SYSTEMS

EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch Offers Breakthrough Performance, Highest Scalability, Lowest Power Consumption and Lowest Cost of Switching in Its Class: Woven Systems, the leading innovator of Ethernet fabric solutions, has announced the introduction of its EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch. The switch is the first of a new class of switches to meet the growing needs of next generation interconnect requirements and applications targeting multi-core servers, IP storage, data center grids, server consolidation and virtualization. With up to 144 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) ports, the EFX 1000 delivers the industry's highest port density solution -- neatly packaged in an energy-efficient chassis that provides seamless setup and management for ease of system deployment and Active Congestion Management for optimal performance. Until recently, network architect's options for scaling network infrastructure were limited, because of Gigabit Ethernet's limited scalability and the added latency and complexity of Layer 3 routing. Woven Systems eliminates Ethernet's scalability limitations with a low cost, massively scalable 10 GE fabric that delivers high bandwidth and low latency. Woven removes capacity bottlenecks with resilient, non-blocking multi-path fabrics scaling to over 4000 10 GE edge ports. To reliably assure high performance and availability across the fabric, Woven's patented vSCALE technology with Active Congestion Management dynamically detects congestion and redirects traffic across less congested paths. "First generation 10 GE switches that were based on crossbars, packet processors, and large buffers were optimized for metropolitan area and wide area applications, and as a result, were saddled with expensive, power-hungry architectures that were latency prone," says Helen Chen, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. "This makes them impractical for large data center applications. Next generation designs, such as Woven's, gives the promise of a unified data center fabric that achieves performance and latency combined with the low cost, low power and ease of deployment benefits of ubiquitous Ethernet for connecting servers and storage -- critical requirements for tightly coupled computing applications in the HPC market." "10 GE has an opportunity to become the dominant data center switch fabric if it can challenge InfiniBand's low cost per port, high speed and low latency interconnect capabilities, and Fibre Channel's predictable block-oriented storage capabilities, while retaining Ethernet's standard interface and interoperability benefits," adds Joe Skorupa, Research VP, Enterprise Network Services and Infrastructure at Gartner. "Companies that address these issues will enjoy a rapidly expanding market." The EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch is designed to simplify network operations with plug-and-play intelligence, ubiquitous interoperability, and automatic tuning and balancing. IT personnel can work with familiar, standards-based Ethernet technology, eliminating the need for specialized expertise, re-building existing applications, or complex re-routing and re-configuration. At 1/5th the cost, 1/5th the rack space and 1/5th the power consumption of alternative systems, Woven delivers the lowest total cost of ownership in the market today. "Our new switch fabric solution delivers a compelling business case for adopting 10 GE to meet today's data center bandwidth growth challenges in the supercomputing and commercial markets," concludes Harry Quackenboss, President and CEO of Woven Systems. "The EFX 1000 offers users a strong return-on-investment with extraordinary performance and scalability to meet their evolving network requirements."