Turbo charge your network capacity with 10 Gigabit Ethernet

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10 gigabit ethernet switching solutions

INTRODUCTION

Ethernet is the enduring success story of local area networking. Now into its third decade it continues to develop and improve with support for faster speeds, new interfaces and longer trans-mission distances. The latest generation of Ethernet continues the tradition of increasing the transmission speed by tenfold to a staggering 10 Gigabit per second. It supports transmission distances of up to 40km when using single-mode fi ber optic ca-bling and enables critical business applications that were not previously available using previous Ethernet standards.

In this SMC Technology Primer we explain the jargon and show how you can benefi t from the latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet stan-dard. We will help you to understand the different 10 Gigabit op-tions and explore the new business applications that 10 Gigabit enables. Finally we will show you how SMC builds on over 30 years of design experience to give you the best 10 Gigabit Eth-ernet solutions on the market.

THE ETHERNET FAMILY

Since its development in the early 1980s by Digital Equip-ment Corporation, Intel and Xerox, Ethernet has become the de-facto physical layer standard for local area networking. In that time it has progressed from a 10Mbps shared broadcast system running over thick coaxial cable to 10Gbps running full duplex over fi ber optic cables. As shown in Table 1, it is sup-ported over a variety of copper and fi ber media at distances from 100 meters to 40 kilometers.

THE 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET STANDARDS

The original 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard (IEEE 802.3ae) was ratifi ed in June 2002. It follows the standard set by previous Ethernet standards in keeping the media access control (MAC) layer separate from the physical media layer (PHY). Two types of PHY were defi ned: the LAN-PHY and the WAN-PHY.

• The LAN-PHY was to be used with private fi bers such as: single mode fi ber (extended and long haul), multi-mode fi ber (short haul) to cover distanced up to 40 kilometers.• The WAN-PHY can be used with existing SONET/SDH OC-192/STM-64 interfaces providing wide area support over metropolitan, national or even international networks.

Now with the introduction of copper based 10G Ethernet stan-dards the LAN-PHY was updated to include new interface types. The IEEE 802.3ak standard has been ratifi ed to use the high grade copper cable originally developed for the Inifi Band pro-prietary data center cabling standard. Most resently and cru-cially for the development of the 10G market is the introduction of the IEEE802.3an standard which has been ratifi ed in 2006 to use Cat-6a/Cat-7 cabling for transmiting 10 Gigabit ethernet data up to 100m.

WHY DO WE NEED 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET?

The proliferation of multimedia applications combining images, video and sound means that fi le sizes greater than 50 Mbytes are not uncommon. Users expect pictures to appear instanta-neously; only Gigabit Ethernet can guarantee this level of re-sponse time.

The continuing deployment of high performance PCs and work-stations is placing an extra strain on the network infrastruc-ture. While existing Fast Ethernet switches with Gigabit uplinks are fi ne for connecting a few PCs and laptops equipped with 100Mbps Fast Ethernet, they are not appropriate for use in a company deploying Gigabit-capable PCs, workstations and servers. For these environments a high performance Gigabit Ethernet switch with a 10 Gigabit uplink capability is absolutely necessary to give the required levels of control, network perfor-mance, security and reliability.

As the price of the latest 10 Gigabit components inevitably drops, most fi le servers and data storages devices will start to support 10 Gigabit trunks. This will allow even more Gigabit ca-pable PCs and workstations to connect at full speed as shown in Figure 1.

Type Speed (Mbps) IEEE Standard Media Types PHY Type Distance

Ethernet 10 802.3Copper (UTP)Fiber (MMF)

10Base-T10Base-FL

100m2km

Fast Ethernet 100 802.3uCopper (UTP)

Fiber (SMF/MMF)100Base-TX100Base-FX

100m400m

Gigabit Ethernet 1000 802.3ab/z

Copper (UTP)Fiber (MMF)Fiber (SMF)Fiber (SMF)

100Base-CX100Base-SX100Base-LX100Base-LH

100m550m10km70km

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10000 802.3ae802.3ak802.3an

Fiber (LAN-PHY)SDH (WAN-PHY)

DWDMCopper (Infi niBand)

Copper

10GBase-R10GBase-W

10GBase-LX410GBase-CX10GBase-T

10-40 km10-40 km0.3-10 km15-20 m100 m

The 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches can connect directly to stor-age and servers and also be used to build a 10Gbps network backbone running between the main Gigabit switches in the network.

WHICH APPLICATIONS WILL BENEFIT FROM 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET? The main applications for 10 Gigabit Ethernet are:

• Storage Area Network10 Gigabit Ethernet can now be used to build storage area net-works (SANs) replacing mechanisms like FiberChannel, Ultra160 or 320 SCSI. Now with the completion of the iSCSI protocol as defi ned by IETF RFC 3720, iSCSI has the full error recovery feature set required by enterprise storage managers. iSCSI can provide up to 5 times the performance of equivalent FiberChan-nel based SANs for a fraction of the cost. Plus it has the added advantage of being able to operate over longer distances than FiberChannel as shown in Figure 2 below.

• Server Farms Clusters of high speed computers can now be built us-ing low cost processor blades to form high performance com-puter grids or meshes. In many academic and government research networks, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is being used to replace the previous proprietary interconnects such as In-fi niBand, Servernet or Myranet.

• Data back-up and disaster recoveryThe extra distance support when using single-mode fi ber makes 10 Gigabit Ethernet suitable for backing up data between data centers up to 40 kilometers apart as shown in Figure 3. This makes it viable for using dark fi ber connections between data centers located across large metropolitan areas.

SMC’S 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET SWITCH SOLUTIONS

SMC Networks has over 30 years experience in design-ing and manufacturing network equipment. SMC’s Ether-net switches provide a complete off-the-shelf solution in-cluding chassis systems, stackable units, fi xed and modular confi gurations for 10/100/1000Mbps and 10Gbps Ethernet over copper or fi ber.

SMC Networks’ TigerSwitch and TigerStack range of Gigabit Ethernet switches provide full support for:

· 10Gbps connections using copper fi ber or copper interface · 10/100/1000Mbps connections using copper or fi ber interfaces · Full VLAN support with GVRP and IEEE 802.1s/v support · Multilink trunking with LACP · Broadcast fi ltering, traffi c prioritization and rate limiting · Robust security features such as: ACLs, 802.1x for secure network access enabled by RADIUS and TACACS + and SSH, SSL/HTTPS for secure management · Full SNMP Management using EliteView or any other SNMP- based management system

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Figure 1: 10 Gigabit LAN infrastructure

Figure 2

Figure 3: Data back-up and business continuity

10G FIBER

1G FIBER

10G COPPER

1G COPPER

10/100

PoE

WIRELESS

LEGEND

TigerSwitch 10G SMC8708L2

The TigerSwitch 10G - SMC8708L2 is a manageable Layer-2 Switch with eight 10G XFP slots and a high-performance 160Gbps non-blocking architecture which guarantees si-multaneous full duplex activity on all ports, even when running at full load.

TigerStack ll 1000 SMC8824M/ SMC8848M

The TigerStack II 10/100/1000 1000 SMC8824M/48M stacks up to 8 units in a stack, pro-viding up to 384 Gigabit ports. A stack can be created with either of the 24 or 48 port switches, providing unprecedented fl exibility. It provides up to 48 built-in copper Gigabit ports, including (4) Combo SFP ports supporting either copper links or SFP adapters for easy, fl exible connection to fi ber-based Gigabit media and a switching capacity of up to 176Gbps. The 2 10G module slots on the rear of the switch provide support for 10G con-nections. These provide high bandwidth connections to the core of a network and are in additon to the 2 stacking connectors giving high capacity connections to the other units in the stack.

TigerSwitch 10G SMC8724-10BT

The TigerSwitch 10G SMC8724-10BT is a 24 port 10G Switch. It is the fi rst high density 10GBASE-T switch including 20 x 10GBASE-T ports complying with IEEE802.3an support-ing up to 100m on Cat6a cabling. For connecting buildings or more remote locations 4 x XFP ports are included for longer distances. This switch is ideal of datacenter and cluster ap-plications enabling wirespeed performance using easy to manage cabling. The manage-ment software included is L2/L4 for advanced control and quality of service.

10G Network Interface Cards

The SMC Tiger Card™ 10G portfolio includes 10GBASE-T and XFP. They are PCIe (x8) half height cards supporting wirespeed connections from your servers to the rest of the network. These single port server adapters bring high performance and a range of distances giving customers fl exibility. The extremely low power consumption, low latency and high throughput of the SMC Ti-ger Card™ 10G server adapter family makes it the best solution for the networking environments such as high performance computing (HPC), database clusters, and video on demand.

XFP 10G Transceiver

SMC’s XFP 10G transceivers can be used with any of SMC’s XFP based 10G solutions. Chose from XFP transceivers for short range (10GBASE-SR, 300m) to long range (10GBASE-ER, 40 km)

Uplink Modules

1 port uplink modules for the SMC8824M and SMC8848M providing 10G connections for Fiber and 10GBASE-T. NOTE: When using the SMCXFPMOD an XFP transciever is also required.

For more informationFor more information about SMC’s unique 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch solutions and to fi nd out how they can help you turbo charge your data cen-ter to increase performance, maximize your network availability and reduce expensive downtime visit our website at www.smc.com

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