The Ultra-high capacity, Ultra-high Reliability Core

If you embrace the CX switch architecture you can build extremely high-capacity, cheap network cores with small modular switches. You have a choice of two kinds of these core switches, and both run the same Layer 3, modular and nonstop OS.

One kind is a line of 2.5 TBPS switches with 10, 25 and 40 gigabit Ethernet, wire-speed ports. These have five fans, redundant, hot-swap power supplies, and redundant flash for OS and configuration images. You can put two switches together to make a single virtual switch and make the entire switch physically and spatially redundant.

The other kind is a line of 6.4 TBPS switches, with 10, 25, 40 and 100 gigabit Ethernet, wire-speed ports. These have six fans and redundant, hot-swap power supplies, and redundant flash for OS and configuration images. You can put two switches together to make a single virtual switch and make the entire switch physically and spatially redundant.

What can you do with this architecture? Here’s a living example:

Two 6.4 TBPS switches make up a network core with a 2-switch virtual bandwidth of as much as 1,600 GBPS. This new virtual switch then downlinks with many 40 GBPS connections to a pair of 2.5 TBPS switches—making one virtual switch—in each data center. All data center servers, storage, other resources are then dual-homed to each data center virtual switch.

The same switches used in the data center are used to make a very high capacity, completely redundant network aggregation layer that’s then dual-routed to both sides of the network core. Each edge switch connection is automatically redundant to the network core and then through that core to the completely redundant data centers, and 90+ percent of the network configuration—outside the two network core switches in the two data centers—is at Layer 2.

We can plan one of these core switch configurations for you. They’re guaranteed to cost less than the more conventional options, have better reliability, and be able to support however many connections you need.

The Totally New Switch Architecture