Colorado Springs, Colo. - In an end-of-year surprise, Extreme Networks Inc. has launched the Black Diamond 10K switch with a full new operating system, including service interfaces based on XML, and six new ASICs for packet forwarding and switching. The six ASICs form a suite that Extreme calls the 4GNSS, for Fourth Generation Network Silicon System.
"We wanted full scalability and resilience in a terabit-switching platform, so a full revamp of the Black Diamond architecture was required," said Timon Sloane, director of product management at Extreme Networks.
The Black Diamond 10K offers a 1.6-Tbit/second capacity and can handle 48 ports of 10-Gbit Ethernet and 480 ports of Gigabit Ethernet.
To prepare the network operating system for true fail-safe performance, Extreme designed the new ExtremeWare XOS in a modular format. A hardware abstraction layer separates the network drivers from lower-layer services such as IP v4/v6 support, and system libraries. Above the basic services are network-wide services such as routing and security. At the highest OS layer, an XML interface allows easy access to external applications for communications and security. All elements of the ExtremeWare XOS kernel and services are based on Unix.
Extreme is not giving detailed partition information on the six ASICs in its 4GNSS family, except to say that two are for physical-layer interfaces, two deal with the switching fabric and two handle packet forwarding, with one of the latter incorporating large lookup tables with the capability of executing longest-prefix matches.
The ASICs have direct hardware support for IPv6 and for multiprotocol label switching.
A new traffic-monitoring methodology in the ASICs is said to carry advantages in secure filtering of traffic as well as network preprocessing for faster handling of Internet Protocol flows. The Clear-Flow architecture handles packets more efficiently than monitoring methods such as SNMP's RMON or Cisco's NetFlow, Sloane said, yet it can be used to augment and more efficiently track RMON and NetFlow traffic.
The hardware hooks for secure services and network analysis that Extreme has built into the Black Diamond 10K can be leveraged in a future system Extreme plans to introduce next year called the Interactive Threat Containment Analysis Engine. Sloane said it would be able to measure data flow through Black Diamond, analyzing normal traffic flows while looking for anomalies.
Extreme will begin shipping Black Diamond 10K this week. Baseline price of the chassis is $90,000, with each 10-Gbit port priced at $7,165 and each Gigabit port at $666.
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