10GBASE-T And 10G SFP+ shows big with new switches

Interop 2011, now the show to attend for data center switching systems, provided some real eye openers.

Better still, although anyone can see front panel photos on new products’ web sites, LightCounting received permission to show candid, cell phone photos revealing inside the boxes of several systems—views not often available. In this report, we also discuss some of our own conclusions about the future of 10GBASE-T, Junipers new QFabric switching architecture, Mellanox’s entry into Ethernet switching, and the future of uplinks for 10GbE switches.Marvell Solidifies 10GBASE-T market with purchase of Solarflare’s assets

On Monday, May 9, just before Interop opened, Solarflare announced the sale of its 10GBASE-T PHY assets to an unnamed company. Then, Marvell announced the acquisition of 10GBASE-T Phy assets from an unnamed company. On Wednesday, May 11, Marvell suddenly announced new 40nm quad and dual port 10GBASE-T chips. Although Marvell has not made the acquisition public yet, our sources say the deal is done. Further, HP announced an eight-port 10GBASE-T module for its ProCurve E8200zl switch series using Solarflare’s (now Marvell’s) PHYs. At the show, we snapped a quick picture of the module (see Figure 1). This design win for Solarflare undoubtedly helped the sale of the assets, because once a major switching OEM like HP goes through the huge amount of testing and validation in order to bring a product to market, Solarflare has proven that the PHY works in the field.

July 25, 2011

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