Bringing 10GE cost and power consumption toward 1GE levels

Centec Networks has launched its fourth-generation GoldenGate switch silicon, a 1.2 terabit-per-second (Tbps) solution architected specifically to meet the industry’s cost, power and deployment requirements for moving from 1GE to mainstream 10GE, 40GE and 100GE networking. The device also solves key SDN and network virtualization challenges across a broad range of system designs.

“With GoldenGate, Centec is extending its TransWarp™ product line to bring next-generation Ethernet switching silicon costs toward the same small premium over legacy industry solutions as was the case prior to the massive worldwide transition from 10/100Mbps Ethernet to 1GE networking,” said Tao Gu, vice president of business development for Centec Networks. “Centec is also taking 10GE switching silicon to lower power levels made possible using IBM process technology, while providing a key missing piece in switching silicon that the industry has needed in order for SDN to deliver on its value proposition.”

SDN promises improved simplicity by centralizing network control/intelligence and separating it from the network packet-forwarding plane, which requires a high level of visibility and intelligence from forwarding to control plane in order to facilitate critical network decision making. “While previous generations of 10/40GE switch silicon has tended to stress forwarding bandwidth or programmability, Centec’s GoldenGate is optimized to improve real-time SDN decision-making and the resulting user experience by increasing visibility to the forwarding plane,” said Simon Stanley, contributing analyst with Heavy Reading. “This is an important step for fully realizing the SDN vision.”

GoldenGate also is the first terabit switching chip ideally configured with carrier-class features required for metro Ethernet and packet transport applications. These features have been field-proven through Centec’s previous generation of switching silicon. GoldenGate includes all required advanced Service Level Agreement (SLA) tools, support for Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) with an on-chip Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) engine, and synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) and IEEE1588 timing protocols.

“Centec’s GoldenGate switching silicon provides an important new option for system designers in a segment that has been dominated by a single vendor,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “GoldenGate is aimed at the density sweet spot of the emerging mainstream 10GE and 40GE market, and it establishes technology leadership through reduced cost and power as well as important new features as compared with the incumbent leader.”

Product Details
· 1.2Tbps/1200Mpps switching capacity in small, 45x45mm FCPBGA 1825 package: GoldenGate provides 20 percent lower power consumption in a small footprint at half the cost of today’s dominant alternative silicon.
· Native 100GE uplink: GoldenGate supports the latest 10GE requirements with a 100GE uplink that is optimally configured for cost and power in a native 4x25G configuration, eliminating the need for an external 10x10G to 4x25G gearbox.
· Tackles cloud challenges on five key levels: GoldenGate hardware and software delivers:
o Improved application-centric flow completion time and a better user experience for real-life environments including data centers with a diverse mix of short and long flows;
o Improved support for versatile network virtualization use cases, with diverse tunneling overlay technology to support VXLAN, NVGRE and the newest GENEVE protocol;
o Improved flow-level visibility and control in a solution that is VM-aware and supports detection of large (a.k.a. elephant) flows, uses enhanced Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) technology to improve flow visibility, and includes software-defined counters with N-flow technology that support three stages of general OpenFlow processing with up to 64k flow tables;
o Improved fault protection mechanisms including hardware flow self-healing for equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) and link aggregation protocol (LAG) routing, and packet loss minimization on link failures; and
o Improved trouble-shooting, monitoring and analytics capabilities, ranging from active buffering and latency monitoring and logging, to the use of buffer and latency watermarks, microburst detection and logging, and enhanced Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) for remote monitoring.