10 Gigabit Ethernet

Fujitsu: 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching without the sideshow

Without the pomp and circumstance of say a Cisco or a Juniper, Fujitsu launched a 26 port, super low-latency addition to its line of 10 GigE switches. Fujitsu’s selling point?

“We pass packets fast and we pass them reliably,” said Jim Preasmyer, director of sales and business development, Advanced Technology Group, Fujitsu Frontech North America.

“Our customers say that they plug the switches in and they just work.”

Imagine that.

Fujitsu has actually been in the Ethernet switch market since 2005, and this latest switch – the XG2600 – joins a family of Layer 2 Ethernet switches that include 12 and 24-port 10 GigE models, as well as 12 and 48-port 1 Gb/10GbE models.

“Our engineers developed a low latency ASIC and then built a switch box around it,” Preasmyer said.

Fujitsu is also selling on energy efficiency promising use of under 130 watts on the 2600 switches.

As for target markets, Fujitsu will aim for any large enterprise looking for the right switching architecture to support high performance computing and ISCSI or NAS. The company will target universities, content delivery companies, and others that depend on fluid applications flowing between storage, the data center and beyond.

New York Stock Exchange chooses Juniper switches and routers for two new data centers

Juniper Networks scored a big customer win this week, announcing a deal with New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Euronext. NYSE  Euronext is building two new data centers in New York City and London that will support several billion daily transactions across different geographies and asset classes. This is part of the NYSE’s effort to consolidate its 10 global data centers down to two.

In a joint press event, Juniper and the NYSE claimed that the 10 Gibabit Ethernet (GbE) network infrastructure in the data centers will support internal round-trip latency of 50 microseconds. The data centers will have EX 8216 chassis switches in their cores and EX 2500 top-of-rack switches providing access to 10 GbE servers. The data center designs also call for the use of Juniper’s MX Series Ethernet Services Routers.

One interesting bit of information which came to my attention with this release is that the EX 2500 (which does not run Juniper’s JUNOS operating system) is a third party technology (possibly from Blade Network Technologies) which Juniper OEMs.