Mellanox introduces portfolio of 10, 40GbE switches

Connectivity service provider for servers and data centres Mellanox Technologies has launched the SX1000-series of high-density 10 and 40GbE switches. Based on the company's SwitchX switch silicon ICs, the SX-1000 series delivers up to 2.88Tbps of switching in a single 1U device. The SX-1000 uses Mellanox's IC architecture to deliver capacities in bandwidth performance, density, latency of 230ns and power. SX-1000 switches combined with additional peripherals, such as cables and Quad-to-Serial Adapters (QSA), allow for configurations as either 10GbE or 40GbE connections. Mellanox will demonstrate the 1/10/40GbE SX1036 switches, combined with the company's ConnectX-2 EN 40G Ethernet NICs and QSFP copper and fibre cables, and Unified Fabric Manager (UFM). The high speed 40GbE backbone overcomes common bottlenecks and network congestion caused by east/west traffic and storage, and provides up to ten times lower latencies. The SX1035 and SX1036 of 40GbE 1U switches deliver latency performance of 230us at 40GbE and 250us at 10GbE with low power of 6.5W per 40GbE port and 3.6W per 10GbE port and offer configurations such as 36-port 40GbE, 64-port 10GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables and 56 10GbE and eight 40GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables. It also offers configuration of 48 10GbE and 12 40GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables. All SX1000-series of 10 and 40GbE switches support reversed airflow adding enabling data centres with different thermal designs, and consist of redundant and hot-swappable fans and PSUs for higher availability. The SX1000 series is equipped with enhanced chassis management capacities, supporting web UI, CLI and set of security features. The SX1000-series is also supported by Mellanox Unified Fabric Manager (UFM), which provides fabric orchestration and monitoring capacities for virtualising and scaling out data centres. The SX-1000-series of 10 and 40GbE switches will begin shipping to customers by the end of this quarter. The price for the 40GbE switch is approximately USD 1500 per port.