Cavium has recently announced the availability of the much awaited XP60 and XP70 optimized programmable Ethernet switches in 10GbE and 25GbE respectively.
The new XP60 and XP70 family, combined with the production qualified XP80 family of products now extends Cavium's XPliant programmable architecture from 3.2Tbps down to 280Gbps.
The XP70 family of programmable Ethernet switch devices scale from 1Tbps to 1.8Tbps and provides cost-effective seamless 1GBASE-T to 10GBASE-T and 10GbE to 25GbE access connectivity upgrades for enterprise, data center, and carrier networks with support for 40GbE/100GbE uplink connectivity.
Furthermore, the XP60 family brings programmable Ethernet switching capabilities to the campus, embedded, and carrier access markets with devices that scale from 280Gbps to 720Gbps.
According to Dell Oro Group, more than 50% of all servers will be 10GE based by end of 2017, with 10GBase-T shipments growing the fastest and eventually overtaking SFP+ shipments by 2019.
Dell Oro attributes this growth, in part, to the fact that twisted-pair cable has long remained a popular choice for connectivity due to its low cost and ability to terminate exact cable lengths in the field.
Additionally, these installed cable plants support seamless upgrades from 1GbE to 10GbE, giving the data center operators a simple choice for scaling their networks to support LAN/SAN consolidation and virtualization.
In today's environment, the XP60 and XP70 families achieve the ideal mix of price, performance, and power while adding telemetry, and programmability to next-generation switching solutions:
• The XP60 family is cost and power optimized for 1GbE, 2.5GbE, and 10GbE access markets.
• The XP70 family is cost and power optimized for 10GbE/25GbE Top of Rack systems with 100GbE uplinks.
• Integrated Packet Trakker technology delivers a wealth of visibility and telemetry to solve the most intriguing diagnostic issues.
• Fully shared centralized packet buffer.
• Highly scalable network policy engine brings enterprise class security to hybrid cloud and cloud networks.
• Flexible Uniport architecture supports 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, and 100G MAC speeds independently per port.
• Advanced traffic management engine and PFC architecture supports the most demanding mix of RoCE, iWARP, NVMe, and proprietary lossless applications.
Finally, the XP60 and XP70 families leverage the same programmable engines as the field-proven, volume shipping XP80 family.
This enables transparent software migration for current XP80 customers, as well as the use of the entire XPliant suite of software tools.
Today, 100GbE is emerging as the optimal choice for the core network connectivity, for both intra- and inter-data center applications, due to optical component and OEM ‘system level' prices that have fallen below the 40GbE benchmark, which has been considered and deployed as the “next step up” from 10GbE.
“Our research finds that the upgrade cycle from a 40G to 100G core is in full effect, but the solutions for 25Gbps access are still in the early adoption stage,” says Sameh Boujelbene, Dell Oro Group senior director.
“We expect demand for 10G access to remain healthy for years to come.
In a recent IHS Market report, 54% of respondents indicated they would have hybrid clouds deployed by 2018, which will drive the need for 10/25/100GE programmable silicon.