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networkZONE Products for the week of March 10, 2008
Dune Networks Says…
FAP21V/FAP11V: Fully Programmable Metro Ethernet and Access Traffic Manager Devices
Devices enable Carrier and Metro Ethernet switch routers to serve increasing, ever-changing traffic management needs
Dune Networks, a provider of networking devices for Data Center, Enterprise and Carrier Ethernet platforms, introduced two new devices expanding the company’s SAND chipset offering. The devices, named FAP21V and FAP11V offer enhanced Traffic Management functionality addressing edge functionality of Metro Ethernet and Access Networks.
FAP21V and FAP11V provide 20 Gbits/s and 10 Gbits/s full duplex programmable traffic management with an integrated SAND fabric interface. The devices provide one (FAP11V) or two (FAP21V) SPI4.2 interfaces to the line side, DRAMs for deep packet buffering and serial links for fabric and mesh interconnection.
The FAP devices’ unique abilities to interconnect and communicate via the SAND fabric or a mesh, provides a distributed TM functionality across a switching system. Furthermore, they may be used as standard stand-alone ingress and/or egress traffic management devices. A FAP11/21V device provides fully programmable traffic management services, addressing the standards and implementation agreements of the MEF, IETF DiffServ, DSL Forum TR-059/TR-101.
FAP11/21V programmable scheduling includes:
- Fully programmable scheduling hierarchy
- Support for uneven hierarchical schemes
- Single and dual bucket shaping enabling fully specified CIR/CBS and EIR/EBS bandwidth profiles
- Simultaneous Shaping at every level and entity in the hierarchy
- System aware WRED, enabling WRED decisions to be based on full system view.
"Dune Networks’ technological lead has enabled it to win major designs at Tier-one Telco and Enterprise OEMs," said Jag Bolaria, Senior Analyst with the Linley Group. "Continuing this trend, the FAP11/21V programmable traffic manager meets the increasing service requirements at the edge and within metro networks."
"The SAND chipset is the only solution enabling system vendors to build a platform that can scale port rates, port counts, and service schemes. This extends the life cycle of the product line to 10+ years. The new FAP21V and FAP11V devices are prime examples of how to effectively scale the services of a platform while maintaining backward compatibility with all other line cards” said Ofer Iny, CTO of Dune Networks.
EN-Genius Says…
Dune is one of the few switch fabric vendors to survive the tech boom of the late 1990s. Back then, it was tough to keep track of all the merchant switch silicon coming onto the market with dreams of displacing the ASICS that traditionally formed the enterprise and carrier networking gear. Their survival is due in good measure to the switch meshable clos switch fabric architecture (there’s a nice description of a clos switch in Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective) and a dynamic routing scheme that’s usually only found in the proprietary hardware powering Juniper- and Cisco-class heavy iron. This allows Dune’s architecture to scale well and handle heavy loading conditions more gracefully than the statically-routed, centralized switching architectures used by its larger competitors. With the cost and performance pressures being put on both carrier- and enterprise-class networking equipment, it looks to me like Dune is one of the few decent alternatives to rolling your own ASIC left on the market.
A closer look at Dune’s architecture reveals that it uses a shared memory switch fabric (input and output buffered) that, at least on the surface, has some resemblance to those of its competitors at Brand B and Brand M who assemble larger meshed switch arrays from their StrataSwitch and Prestera products. The difference becomes clear when you see that, unlike most other switches which integrate the shared memory switch with the routing function on a single chip, Dune splits the functions. While less cost-effective in smaller, lower-port count products, separating the processor from the fabric allows for routing and traffic management to be handled in a distributed fashion which can scale easily to very high port counts and bandwidths. Broadcom also offers a series of separate fabric/controller devices that are intended for carrier-class equipment, but it still lacks the dynamic routing capabilities offered by Dune. As we shall see, dynamic routing allows Dune’s switch to avoid many of the performance pitfalls that the static table-based routing techniques employed by most other merchant switch silicon are subject to.
Dune FE200 64x64 self-routing fabric elements (FEs) are discrete components which rely on a separate fabric access processor (FAP) to route packets through them and provide traffic management functionality. Links between fabric elements and FAPs are made using 3.125 Gbit/s SerDes connections. Instead of transmitting entire packets using lookup tables that choose the same path for each packet, the FAP breaks them into equal-sized cells which are distributed across the fabric elements. The FAP appends a short header that contains self-routing information and maintains sequence order through the switch fabric so that the packet can be re-assembled on the other side of the switch.
The fabric processors continuously load-balance the traffic across all switch elements to ensure each port carries an equal share of the traffic until the total capacity of the switch is reached. This eliminates the performance foldback that often occurs in statically-routed architectures where even moderately-loaded fabrics can experience congestion when a single link is hit with a traffic spike. Dune’s dynamic routing scheme allows the fabric to quickly adjust to port failures and sharp bursts in traffic on a single port (eg a hot spot) that can bring the other ports of a statically-routed architecture to its knees.
This nice combination of smarts, scalability, and performance makes Dune a natural candidate for high-capacity, high-port count products like Carrier Ethernet- switch/routers aggregating routers, and Ethernet transport platforms. These same attributes recommend it for larger access systems and enterprise-level backbone equipment. Surprisingly, Dune also sees promise for its architecture in the specialized top-of-rack, end of row, and fabric switches that tie together the endless banks of servers in data centers. With the demand for bandwidth within data centers rising even faster than that of the networks they serve, this could eventually prove to be a much larger market than the carrier and enterprise equipment that forms the majority of Dune’s business today.
The FAP11V and FAP21V devices are sampling now with volume production in Q2 of 2008. The FE200 switch fabric is in currently in volume production. Dune was reluctant to share exact pricing of its devices but did say that their intent was to drop the total BOM cost of a high-capacity switch port to around $200/per port, including optical components, and $150/port for copper-based connections. Given today’s prices for MAC, PHY, and passive elements, we can estimate the per-port pricing of the fabric and controller silicon for a large system at around $60.
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