Teak Technologies Previews World's First 10-Gb Congestion-Free Ethernet Switching Solution for IBM BladeCenter

Market Wire, May, 2007

Blade.org founding member, Teak Technologies, previewed its pioneering 10-Gb Congestion-Free Ethernet switching solution, the I3000, for the IBM BladeCenter platform at the IBM PartnerWorld 2007 event here today.

Targeted at the innovative IT manager who is already considering the merit of data center simplification through adoption of 10-GbE in the BladeCenter, the I3000 offers a compelling alternative that combines best-in-class low latency switching with up to 16x price/performance advantage over comparable 10-GbE solutions.

The I3000 is the first in a series of a new category of scalable Congestion-Free Ethernet switching solutions for the New Data Center. These solutions solve the core problem of network congestion spread associated with state-of-art Ethernet switches used in short-haul data center networks.

"Best-effort Ethernet is reactive. Ethernet switches drop packets to signal congestion symptomatically. Packet drops cause TCP timeouts, which can reduce system performance significantly. A single hotspot link can spread congestion network-wide," said Guenter Roeck, CTO at Teak Technologies. "What is needed are highly responsive flow-based Layer-2 mechanisms that leave all other layers of the protocol stack intact, yet are able to create a multi-hop switching environment that proactively avoids congestion and responds efficiently when congestion does occur on an instantaneous basis."

"We use a Collaborative Ethernet framework to guide our vision for the New Data Center," said Sanjay Dua, Chief Marketing Officer at Teak Technologies. "In this framework, Ethernet switches no longer perform in isolated islands, but collaborate proactively with all virtualized compute and storage I/O end-points to maximize application availability and experience."

"Data centers will begin to see more of a coming together of the networking and compute layers," said Zeus Kerravala, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Research at the Yankee Group. "10-Gigabit Ethernet can become the dominant data center fabric if it can challenge Infiniband's low latency and Fiber Channel's deterministic block-level storage connectivity all while maximizing bandwidth asset utilization. Companies that address these core issues will enjoy a rapidly expanding market."

Teak Technologies' portfolio of 10-Gb Congestion-Free Ethernet switching solutions are optimized for high-performance connectivity in the data center access layer and target mission critical applications that are sensitive to packet loss, latency, and availability. Some applications that fall into this category include:

--  Enterprise-class block-level storage connectivity
--  High definition mixed-media content retrieval, caching, and transport
    in IP-TV and cable applications
--  High performance compute and database clusters.
    

Rule-Changing Switching Performance and Economics

The I3000 increases load-invariant, loss-free link utilization by a factor of 4x thereby decreasing the number of managed BladeCenter uplinks also by the same factor. This simplification and up to 16x improvement in price/performance impacts a data center's cost-of-ownership equation in terms of lowering infrastructure acquisition cost, driving higher efficiency from improved asset utilization, and reducing the operating cost associated with deploying network-related management and maintenance assets.

I3000 Switching Solution Highlights

The I3000 solution consists of two elements:

1)  L2 10-Gb CFE Switch Module
    --  Four (4) external 10-Gb CFE uplinks
    --  Two (2) external expansion 10-Gb CFE uplinks accessible through
        bridge modules
    --  Fourteen (14) internal 10-Gb CFE links to server blades
    --  Load-invariant, port-to-port latency less than 200ns in a full-mesh
        configuration across 64 bytes to 16KB jumbo frames
    --  Maximum power consumption less than 45W
    --  Rich feature set along with multiple management options to simplify
        deployment and maintenance
    --  Can be deployed individually, or in pairs, for up to a total of
        four switch modules per BladeCenter H or HT chassis
    --  Fully compatible and interoperable with best-effort 10-GbE
    --  Integrates Fujitsu's chipset MB8AA3021

2)  10-Gb CFE Expansion Card (NIC)
    --  Full duplex XAUI interface that can be connected to any of four
        10-Gb CFE switch modules
    --  State-of-art offload and virtualization features for HPC and
        storage connectivity
    --  BladeCenter server blade hosts: HS-21, LS-21, LS-41
    --  Host Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows and Linux
    --  Host System Virtualization Environments: VmWare ESX Server and XEN
        Hypervisor
    --  Application Transparency: Compatible across all applications
        designed to leverage an Ethernet infrastructure

Interoperability Across Two Modes of Operation

The I3000 interoperates transparently across its two modes of operation:

Mode 1: 10-Gb Congestion-Free Ethernet Switching

The L2 10-Gb CFE Switch Module automatically detects the presence of a 10-Gb CFE expansion card and configures itself for active collaboration in maximizing link utilization and in delivering load-invariant, loss-free performance on a sustainable basis.