Leading ICT Integrators

Advanced Ethernet Technologies

The desire for advanced Ethernet technologies is being driven from two main directions; environmental and performance.

Environmental

The need for faster port speeds along with higher port counts is in turn increasing the environmental pressures on today’s network designers. No better example of this can be seen than in a typical data centre implementation. Today’s data centre designers are seeing increased pressures to reduce power consumption and cooling requirements to help reduce the carbon footprint whilst increasing port densities in order to reduce rack space requirements. All of these key design criteria can help to significantly reduce op-ex costs and hence reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the network infrastructure. Fujin are committed to providing products which provide the highest port densities available for Gigabit Ethernet through to 100Gigabit Ethernet whilst ensuring the lowest TCO possible through reduced power consumption and cooling requirements.

Performance

Ethernet was originally designed to be a best efforts delivery mechanism where it’s possible for packets to be dropped or delivered out of order. Today’s networks largely rely on TCP to provide a recovery mechanism for such issues, however, this comes at a price by way of a considerable overhead in terms of network traffic, network performance and packet processing. Several enhancements to the Ethernet standards are currently being proposed that come under the guise of Converged Enhanced Ethernet. These enhancements include:

• Priority Based Flow Control
• Enhanced Transmission Selection
• Congestion Notification

By incorporating these enhancements to the underlying Ethernet technology it will be possible to provide robust and reliable packet transmission, without incurring the overheads associated with TCP. Coupled with the wide spread adoption of 10Gigabit and faster Ethernet, the use of Ethernet for technologies such as storage and high performance computing cluster traffic becomes viable.

Fujin’s has chosen vendors for Ethernet products that not only support these emerging standards but are driving the standards forward.