Fujitsu Unveils 10 Gb Ethernet Switch

Fujitsu on Wednesday introduced a low-power 10 Gb Ethernet switch for high-performance computing and storage applications.

Fujitsu XG2600 10 Gb Ethernet Switch

The XG2600 is the latest addition to the company's family of XG Layer 2 Ethernet switches. The 26-port XG2600 runs on less than five watts per port, a 30% reduction from other switches in the product line. The XG2600 utilizes SFP+ optical modules and is designed for use with SFP+ twinax copper cables.

The Fujitsu XG family of switches are compact devices aimed at networking infrastructures for video-server applications and high-performance computing. The product line is also targeted at the Internet SCSI and networked-attached storage markets.

The XG2600 includes field-reversible cooling fans that can reduce the overall cost of cooling, according to Fujitsu. The 1U high device is small enough to fit into existing networks and system chassis.

Fujitsu plans to demonstrate the XG2600 at the Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Ore., next week. The company will sell the switch for $18,000.

The 10 Gb Ethernet standard is the fastest of the Ethernet standards, delivering a data rate of 10 Gbit per second, which is 10 times faster than Gigabit Ethernet. The technology has grown in importance to relieve data center congestion due to storage demands, server virtualization, video, data warehousing, line-of-business applications, and transaction processing.

While 10 GbE technology was expensive when first introduced, the cost has been coming down. Today, the operations savings that 10 GbE equipment can trigger makes upgrading considerably more appealing to IT organizations.

One major advantage to 10 GbE technology is the smaller footprint and reduced power consumption, which helps reduce operational costs in data centers. In addition, the faster data rate can reduce the number of networking environments, which also reduces cost.

In May, Mellanox Technologies demonstrated at the Interop Conference and Expo complete end-to-end connectivity configurations to reduce the total cost of 10 GbE applications. Mellanox, which specializes in connectivity solutions for servers and storage, teamed up with Arista Networks and Supermicro in the demo. Arista provided its 7200T switches, while Supermicro supplied its Xeon 5500 processor-based Supermicro 2U Twin2 SuperServers.

By combining products, the vendors were able to reduce cabling, power consumption, and space usage. At the same time, powerful computational machines with 10-Gb performance stats were enabled.

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