Mellanox launches new Ethernet switches for next-gen data centres
Mellanox Technologies, a provider of solutions for data center servers and storage systems, has today announced the launch of its SN4000 Ethernet switches.
Mellanox says the Ethernet switch is optimised for cloud, Ethernet storage fabric and AI applications through its support from Spectrum-3.
Spectrum-3 supports scale, tunnelling, and network virtualisation capabilities with its advanced FlexFlow packet processing technology and WJH (What Just Happened) based real-time telemetry.
Spectrum-3 is ideal for building high-performance layer-2 and layer-3 fabrics, for both virtualised and non-virtualised use cases, according to Mellanox.
The new SN4000 platforms come in flexible form-factors supporting a combination of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE.
These platforms complement the 200/400GbE SN3000 leaf switches to form an efficient and high bandwidth leaf/spine network, says Mellanox.
"Spectrum-3 offers better performance, more advanced features, and easier management than any other 12.8 terabit switch," says Mellanox vice president of Ethernet switches Amit Katz.
"Our VXLAN support features single-pass routing for more than 500,000 tunnels, making Spectrum-3 the best switch not only for cloud data centers, but for any networking deployment supporting virtualisation, containers, or microservices.
Key highlights
- Up to 128 ports of 100GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE or 32 ports of 400GbE
- Up to 200,000 NAT entries, and 1 million on-chip routes
- Fully shared packet buffer to maximise burst absorption and deliver fair bandwidth sharing
- RoCE-Ready one-click configuration with hardware-accelerated, end-to-end congestion management to simplify networking for storage, AI, and big data workloads
- FlexFlow programmable pipeline which delivers rich network processing capabilities at an unprecedented scale
- WJH based granular telemetry to simplify network operations and dramatically reduce mean time to issue resolution
- Simultaneous NRZ and PAM4 port speeds allowing flexible configurations
- Dual stack IPV4 and IPV6 protocol operation
- Support for overlay protocols including EVPN, VXLAN-GPE, MPLS-over-GRE/UDP, NSH, NVGRE, MPLS/IPv6 based segment routing
- Flowlet-based adaptive routing maximises performance and network utilisation for layer-3 fabrics with high cross-sectional bandwidth
- Support for customer-defined, on-switch, containerised microservices with complete SDK access to host management, orchestration, and telemetry applications.
An established partner of Mellanox, Cumulus hopes the launch of the new Ethernet switch will bolster their portfolio.
"Mellanox and Cumulus have been collaborating for over five years to help our data center customers build agile, high performance and highly-automated infrastructure using Linux," says Cumulus Networks chief executive officer Josh Leslie.
"Spectrum-3 enables a feature-rich leaf/spine network architecture able to achieve massive scale, at twice the performance as was previously possible, making the combination of Cumulus Linux and Spectrum-3 an important part of our product portfolio.
