Latest Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet Line Cards Incorporate Flexible Pluggable Transceiver Modules

Force10 Networks today announced the addition of two new line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) and GbE line cards for use within its ExaScale virtualized core switch/routers that incorporate flexible pluggable transceiver modules. The 10-port 10 GbE line card and 50-port GbE line card for the ExaScale E1200 and the midsized ExaScale E600 chassis facilitate greater density to support a broader range of applications, such as wide area networks (WANs), long-haul optical networks and data center and cloud computing environments.

“In addition to maintaining significant functionality, density and flexibility along with ongoing investment protection, customers operating virtualized data centers, HPCC or cloud computing applications need robust solutions that help simplify—not complicate—their respective environments,” says Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing, Force10 Networks. “By delivering industry-leading densities, our ExaScale line cards reflect the company’s commitment to ensuring our customers maintain the lowest TCO possible, even as they scale and manage their high-performance networks.”

The new line cards help to extend the performance leadership of Force10, while providing flexibility to accommodate a broad range of application requirements. In addition to line-rate switching and routing and non-blocking scalability, the Force10 ExaScale switch/router offers support for an industry-leading 140 line-rate 10 GbE ports per chassis and 125 Gbps/slot data capacity. The new ExaScale 10-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) line card provides support for SR, LR, ER, ZR, and CX4 interfaces using pluggable XFP transceiver modules, making them ideally suited for applications in next-generation data centers as well as in WAN and long-haul optical networks. Utilizing XFPs that also incorporate dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) enables the support of direct, data center-to-data center interconnections over the deployed optical infrastructure using an alien wavelength. This functionality results in simpler, more efficient virtualized data centers and cloud computing networks.

The new ExaScale 50-port GbE line card supports pluggable SFP modules, which provide support for SX, LX, ZX and 1000Base-T interfaces. The line card’s high-density design enables the ExaScale switch/router to support up to 700 line-rate GbE SFP ports in a single chassis.

The new line cards are based on the ExaScale suite of advanced, packet processing and switching ASICs that leverage Force10 high-performance hardware and software design expertise, patented backplane technology, and industry-leading density, performance and flexibility. The non-blocking card also significantly cuts ongoing operational expenses by implementing simplified, next-generation management technology, flexible virtualization applications and open technology.

Leveraging the Force10 Virtualization Framework

Force10’s Ethernet products incorporate the Force10 Virtualization Framework technology suite, which enables data centers and service providers to build, manage and automate network and application performance and processes.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing for the 50-port 10/100/1000Base-T line card starts at $42,000. The 10-port 10GbE starts at $66,000. For more information, including product data sheets, specifications and images, please visit http://www.force10networks.com/products/ExaScale_50pGbE.asp and http://www.force10networks.com/products/ExaScale_10X10GbE_XFP.asp.