Mar 20 2010
Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced a new series of multi-layer Ethernet devices that enable faster connectivity between servers in the data center.
The new Broadcom® BCM56840 series represents the eighth generation of the company's leading StrataXGS® switch architecture and provides up to 64-ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) with the flexibility to also support 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE).
Until now, only large corporations such as Fortune 500 companies and research organizations have had the resources to build data centers with high performance 10GbE switches connected directly to servers. The new Broadcom BCM56840 series changes these economics by delivering high performance, sub-microsecond latency and ultra low power on a single chip, thereby enabling any data center - regardless of size - to unleash the power of cloud computing.
Designed in 40 nanometer (nm) process technology, the BCM56840 series offers an unprecedented level of integration and converged Ethernet capabilities marking the first time a silicon solution has been available for the practical large scale deployment of 10GbE. With 64-ports of 10GbE or 16-ports of 40GbE connectivity, integrated SerDes, and scalable services, the new BCM56840 series is specifically designed to unlock the greater potential of cloud computing and fuel more widespread market adoption of 10GbE. The series can be used as a foundation element to build next generation top-of-rack switches, blade switches and modular switches. These switches can be tied together to deliver a highly scalable network, interconnecting thousands of servers for enterprise, as well as cloud provider data centers. With cut-through switching and sub-microsecond latency performance, the BCM56840 series is an ideal switch solution for algorithmic trading and high performance compute cluster environments.
The BCM56840 series supports Layer 2 / Layer 3 (L2 / L3) switching with dynamic access control lists (ACLs) and delivers on four critical requirements for the data center:
- Bandwidth Density:
- Industry's first 64-port 10GbE switch silicon solution.
- Integrates 10 Gigabit (10G) serializers/deserializers (SerDes) reducing the total number of components needed for a system.Provides direct 40GbE connectivity enabling easier deployment and simpler management.
- Power and Cooling:
- Industry's lowest power 640 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Ethernet switch.
- Supports the Energy Efficient Ethernet™ (EEE) IEEE P802.3az draft standard.
- High performance 10G SerDes optimized for data center applications lowers power consumption.
- Low Latency:
- Industry's lowest latency 640 Gbps Ethernet switch with integrated 10G SerDes.
- Supports cut-through switching.
- Data Center Services:
- Provides virtualization support and visibility to individual virtual machines in the network allowing security, access control and quality-of-service (QoS) policies to be tied to virtual machines. This is critical to enable the large scale deployment of server virtualization and mobility of workloads.
- Converged networking
- Data Center Bridging (DCB) – unifies storage and networking under one technology with lossless Ethernet.
- Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) – converges storage over Ethernet networks enabling a reduction in server input/output (I/O), cabling and power.
- Provides high utilization multi-pathing via Transparent Interconnect of Lots of Links (TRILL) simplifying network topologies while increasing network resiliency and scalability.
Additional Highlights/Key Facts:
- The BCM56840 series is ideal for data center applications and is compatible with aggregation and core products obtained through the recent acquisition of Dune Networks.
- Broadcom has complementary silicon and software solutions for the data center market segment including:
- BCM84834 – 40nm quad-port 10GBASE-T PHY
- BCM57712 – 10GbE dual-port converged network interface controller (C-NIC)
- BCM8754 – 10GbE SFP+ PHY
- Software – The BCM56840 series is fully supported by Broadcom's widely adopted and field proven software application programming interface (API) that is common across the entire StrataXGS product line.
- The BCM56840 switch series is now sampling to early access customers.