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During IP EXPO, Force10 Networks is showcasing Open Cloud Networking (OCN). With OCN, we return the power to you, the customer giving you maximum choice, to have complete architectural freedom and to experience uncompromised price/performance.
It’s simple and based on the three principle ingredients to address data centres of all shapes and sizes - Open Architectures, Open Automation and Open Ecosystems.
Come to our stand and discover the future with Force10’s Open Cloud Networking
Contact information
Address
Force10 Networks
Abbey Business Centre
Abbey House 450 Bath Road
Longford Heathrow
UB7 0EB
UK
Telephone: +44 (0) 208 757 8802
Email: info@force10networks.com
Website: www.force10networks.com
Press Releases
Dell Announces Intent to Acquire Datacenter Networking Leader Force10 Networks
Force10 Teams With Solarflare to Offer Bundled End-to-End 10GbE Solution
Force10 Networks Receives 2011 Leadership Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's NGN Magazine
Force10 Networks To Showcase Open Cloud Networking Solutions at Interop Las Vegas
Force10 Uses Intel Expressway Cloud Access 360 for Cloud–Bursting and SaaS Application Deployment
Case Studies
University College London Deploys a Zero-latency Platform from Force10 to Study Cheaper, Faster Broadband Internet Connections
Your broadband connection could be both cheaper and more secure in future as a result of research now underway at University College London (UCL) — and it will be because Force10 Networks’ highspeed switches provided UCL’s research network with a rock-solid, zero-latency platform on which to build its test labs, and with which to take its researches further than before.
Background
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are always looking to lower their costs and pass on some of those savings to their customers. Much of the cost associated with running an ISP business is the sheer amount of hardware that’s required. A significant proportion of that consists of single-use appliances, such as routers — core to the ISP business — and other functions, including network and application management but especially security, which in recent years has moved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have.
As a result, the number of security appliances has burgeoned. According to IT industry research and analysis firm IDC, telcos are big purchasers of such devices, which run applications such intrusion prevention and firewalling. It means they have a lot of capital tied up in those boxes, each of which requires maintenance, power and cooling and space, none of which is cheap.
If they could move those applications off expensive, single-use boxes and onto cheap, PC-based servers, they could reduce hardware acquisition and operational expenses considerably. With virtualisation technology, they could run several such applications on a single server, cutting costs even further.
That’s what the work of UCL researcher Adam Greenhalgh and his colleagues could enable. The UCL test labs’ research is currently funded by the UK Government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and European Framework programmes. The research aims to discover how highly demanding applications such as security appliances — for example, firewalls — run on standard PCs, which is where the bottlenecks are, and what can and needs to be done to smooth over or eliminate them.
For example, key areas Greenhalgh is investigating include memory bottlenecks in multi-core computers, and the path that network packets follow inside the PC between the network interface and the processor, and back again.
Selection Criteria
The tests required to explore these issues demand huge amounts of consistent bandwidth, so UCL specified a test lab consisting of some 100 PCs connected in a variety of topologies. Once installed, the PCs needed a network to connect them, and a switch at the centre that could handle the massive load.
Greenhalgh explains: “We were after a switch with a large number of ports, over 400 — and they needed to be non-blocking. Those were our key requirements. We looked at two vendors — Force10 and one other — and selected Force10’s E1200.” Specifically, UCL’s key research criteria were:
•Lots of ports on a single chassis (400 active ports)
•Ability to get high density, wire speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a single chassis
•Constant latency non-blocking across the backplane
“The switch sets up the topology for the network, so we might end up with a classical Internet to ISP scenario to link to one or more boxes and then examine the traffic types,” says Greenhalgh. The types of application that Greenhalgh and his colleagues are testing include software routers and security appliances running in virtual machines — the kind of setup an ISP could deploy to reduce its hardware acquisition and maintenance expenditure. The volumes of bandwidth and low latency requirements are akin to those of a telco or enterprise requiring a high-speed switch fabric inside its data centre.
Only the Force10 Networks E1200 met these tough requirements, so UCL bought an E1200 chassis with a route processor, nine switch fabric cards, plus a full selection of 48-port Gigabit Ethernet line cards to bring the total port count to over 500. What swung it in favour of Force10’s E1200 was not just performance, according to Greenhalgh. It was also that “line speed was constant across the backplane. For us, constant performance and latency more important than speed.”
Deployment and experience
Setting up the equipment was easy, says Greenhalgh. So easy in fact, that the researchers did it all themselves, without the help of willing Force10 systems engineers and with only one small glitch, resulting from the labs having bought the wrong power supply. Once that was sorted out, the E1200 went to work with a will.
UCL also needed to call Force 10 Networks’ technical support to resolve an issue in an SNMP module. “We resolved those by email and by phone — we found it easy and straightforward,” says Greenhalgh.
Greenhalgh says that the switch has performed up to and beyond his expectations. “There’s no latency, and we would buy more if needed to, although this depends on grants.”
“It’s fully populated with cards and ports — we have 460 cables going into it — but it’s done exactly what we wanted, it doesn’t get in the way, we don’t worry about it or notice it — which means there’s no latency on the experiments. It’s the best thing we can say.”
“It’s there, it works,” he says.
Greenhalgh sees the E1200 at the heart of the test network as a solid platform for future developments. “We’re likely to develop it with more line cards but I don’t see much change until we need to upgrade the switch.”
cp_UniversityCollegeLondon.pdf 326.15 kB
Smashing Atoms: CERN turns to Force10 To Support Next-generation Physics Research
How do you take data from the world’s largest proton collider and distribute it to scientists around the globe?
That’s the challenge the technology group at Geneva-based CERN faced in designing the network to support the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is slated to go on-line in 2008.
The LHC, which is being built in the same tunnels as CERN’s 27 kilometer long Large Electron Positron collider, will accelerate proton beams, producing an estimated 15 petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually. Huge detectors will capture what happens when the beams collide and feed the data into a computing grid for initial processing. From CERN the data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 computing centers for subsequent analysis and distribution, providing almost 7000 scientists in around 500 institutes and universities with data from the LHC experiments.
"Networking is a highly important part of the overall infrastructure," says David Foster, communications, systems and networking group leader at CERN. "It touches the experiments themselves, the computing center at CERN, and it supports distributing the data out to the collaborating institutes."
The members of the LHC computing team are building the network from the ground up to interconnect the LHC computer center’s farm of 6,000 machines and to support 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of aggregate bandwidth out of the laboratory to Tier-1 centers in Europe, North America, and Asia. In addition, the team needed network infrastructure to support the various LHC experiments; one experiment alone requires 1,000 one-Gbps ports. Given the scale of the new infrastructure it’s installing, the team also decided to upgrade the lab’s campus backbone to a 600 Gbps core.
cp_cern_grid.pdf 513.49 kB
Central Europe’s Largest Internet Exchange Scales to Support Tripling Traffic Growth with Force10 Networks
Over the last 12 months traffic has nearly tripled from 80 Gbps to more than 200 Gbps. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers scalable and predictable performance regardless of traffic peaks and lows throughout the day.
Harald Summa saw the storm clouds forming. As CEO of the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) in Frankfurt, Summa is used to seeing thunderstorms in central Germany. However, these storm clouds wouldn’t bring rain. Instead they represented the rapidly growing Internet traffic that was threatening to wash over his business.
Founded in 1995, DE-CIX enables Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers to peer directly with each other to significantly reduce IP transit costs and improve performance. As the largest Internet exchange in Central and Eastern Europe, DE-CIX provides primary Internet connectivity to about 210 ISPs in Europe. Those ISPs then provide services to roughly 80 percent of the population in Germany and 35 percent in Europe, respectively.
The exchange has seen its traffic grow from 30 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to nearly 200 Gbps in just 12 months. This increase was fueled by the convergence of an increase in customers, who in turn added their own new customers, and the increasing use of bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications like YouTube and Flickr.
Burdened with a networking infrastructure that could not adequately scale to meet demand, DE-CIX’s marching orders were not unlike other major Internet exchanges in Europe: Deploy a core infrastructure capable of satisfying today’s bandwidth demands and have the capacity and resiliency to process relentlessly increasing traffic.
"If we continue to see Internet traffic increase at the same rate that we’ve seen in the last 12 months and not do anything about it, in two or three years’ time economic markets in Europe will slow down because Internet exchange points will not be able to handle the 400, 500 or 600 (Gbps) throughput that we anticipate," says Summa.
Clearly, the storm clouds are not just passing through.
Wanted: Vendor with a Visio
Anticipating such dramatic traffic increases, DE-CIX could experience serious service consequences if it was not able to quickly deploy its network infrastructure. Simultaneously, company officials had to feel comfortable that their equipment had the capacity to scale to meet the increasing number of customers and the traffic they created. Not surprisingly, scalability and reliability played a huge role during the vendor selection process. In addition, the exchange wanted to work with a partner that had a vision to provide a cogent product roadmap.
"It was most important that the new vendor could cope effectively with the growing traffic demands," Summa recalls. "We didn’t want to be in the same situation we are in now two to three years down the road."
Weighing all the options, Force10 Networks was DE-CIX’s obvious choice. The exchange selected the TeraScale E-Series® family of switch/routers based on its scalable performance, reliability resulting from its resilient hardware and software, as well as the company’s ability to deliver a smooth transition path from its existing networking equipment.
DE-CIX deployed one TeraScale E1200 in each of its four colocation facilities in Frankfurt via a redundant backbone that consists of multiple and redundant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) circuits connected over dark fiber. With its ability to support 1,260 Gigabit and 224 10 GbE ports, the Force10 TeraScale E1200 provides the density DE-CIX needs to offer 10 GbE services and seamlessly scale its customer base.
Additional capacity resulting from the deployment enabled DE-CIX to quickly sell 10 GbE connectivity to more than 90 new customers and migrate about 110 customers from 100 Megabit to Gigabit Ethernet ports within the first six months of deployment. Today DE-CIX is operating 100 ten Gigabit Ethernet ports. With its industry-leading port density, DE-CIX can run more links through a single E1200, simplifying overall network management. As a result, the exchange could reduce its proportionate operational costs.
High Expectations for Reliability
With 213 leading ISPs as customers, service level agreements mandate extremely high reliability requirements for DE-CIX. Growing weary of its existing equipment and knowing it would only deteriorate as traffic demands increased, DE-CIX needed absolute network resiliency. It found that resiliency in the Force10 TeraScale E-Series. Its multiprocessor architecture provides protected memory for Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing and management functions, creating a fault-tolerant system that can isolate issues without impacting other system processes.
To build in further reliability, the TeraScale E-Series provides fully redundant connections between the four colocation facilities. This high performance network design leverages the robust implementation of VLAN tagging and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol in the Force10 Operating System (FTOS) software to ensure reliability in high traffic conditions or failure. By leveraging these protocols to share traffic between the redundant links, DE-CIX avoids the overhead costs of inactive redundant networking elements that stand by in a passive mode until a failure occurs. If a failure does occur, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series fails over to the secondary path with zero packet loss.
Rapid Deployment Critical to Success
For DE-CIX, the best networking technology in the world would not help their critical business situation if they could not quickly deploy. "If we had not chosen Force10 and deployed the following month, our business could have collapsed; our existing equipment did not have the capability to get the traffic out of the exchange point," says Summa.
Having witnessed similar deployments take as long as six months, DE-CIX’s IT staff took just 60 days to install and migrate all its customers. "This was remarkable considering we moved 320 ports, and there wasn’t a single problem."
Clear Skies Ahead
Looking ahead, Summa sees clear skies ahead for his business. "We made a great choice with Force10. I know other exchange points continue to use other vendors, and they have to bring in new boxes every day. With Force10, we have an infrastructure that can grow as we do."
F10_DE-CIX.pdf 145.01 kB
CGGVeritas Implements their Dream Data Center Design with Force10 E-Series Switch/Routers
Processing volumes of data better, faster and cheaper is at the heart of CGGVeritas’s value proposition to its customers — making IT strategic to the company’s competitiveness. So when it came time to upgrade its computing clusters from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connections (one of several cluster interconnect technologies used), the IT team knew it had an opportunity to design a network core that could help the company reduce data center costs and hone its competitive edge for years to come.
Veritas, headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a leading provider of integrated geophysical information and services to the petroleum industry worldwide. Among its services are seismic survey planning and design, seismic data acquisition, and the processing, visualization, and archiving of 3D and 2D data.
Due to the enormous amount of processing capacity and network bandwidth required to manipulate such complex data, Veritas’ IT infrastructure is key to its ability to generate revenue. Making that infrastructure ever more efficient is a challenge for IT. "We have to be able to drive down our costs so we can reduce costs to customers," notes Phil Gaskell, Veritas’ Global Network Manager. "If we can deploy a network for $3 million as opposed to $5 million, we can deliver a more cost effective solution and improve our bottom line."
When IT staff brainstormed about what the ideal data processing facility design would be, it became clear they wanted fewer layers in the network. That was our dream design — everything taken away, with a big chuffing switch with lots of ports at the core," says Doug Northrup, Veritas’ Houston Manager of Networks. Force10 Networks was the only vendor that could deliver a switch/router with the port density and resiliency Veritas needed, according to Northrup.
cp_Veritas.pdf 321.61 kB
eHarmony Builds Reliable Relationship with Force10 Networks
While dating can be chock full of obstacles, eHarmony is working to make sure a network outage is not one of them. With nearly 100 members on average marrying every day, the unrelenting and rapidly growing network bandwidth required to support that level of customer connection posed a great challenge for the relationship site.
To provide a reliable, flexible and high performance network capable of effectively scaling to answer future demands, eHarmony deployed the Force10 Networks® TeraScale E-Series® family of switch/routers and the C300 resilient switch.
With 14 million registered users and industry-leading brand recognition, eHarmony has a reputation for successfully matching registered users based on factors such as values, spiritual beliefs and sense of humor. To begin the process of achieving a deeper level of compatibility, eHarmony members fill out an online relationship questionnaire with more than 400 questions.
With scores of new users every day, facilitating a possible love connection requires a significant amount of computing power from processing and storing the filled-out questionnaires to sending out initial matches to the members within six hours.
CP_eHarmony.pdf 210.13 kB
Whitepapers
Open Network Automation is Critical to the Virtual Data Center
The data center is on the verge of another major transition – the shift to a fully virtualized data center This will lower the cost of computing, improve uptime and application performance and raise corporate productivity to new heights. However, along the way, data center managers will encounter new challenges in managing a data center built on pools of virtual resources instead of physical ones.
OpenNetworkAutomation.pdf 174.42 kB
The Role of Buffer Management
This white paper describes the rationale for providing switch/routers with port buffers that are scaled to the expected delay-bandwidth product (DBP). DBP-sized buffers, together with RED congestion avoidance, can be used to optimize the utilization of congested links by TCP applications.
While large buffers primarily benefit long-term TCP application flows, QoS functionality can be leveraged to allocate appropriate levels of buffering and bandwidth to different classes of traffic and to protect delay-sensitive applications from excessive queuing delays associated with large buffers.
Next the document focuses on the general requirements for optimizing buffer management for 10 GbE matrix switches. This discussion is illustrated by a description of how the architecture and design of the Force10 E-Series of switch/router leverage the combination of line-rate packet processing and QoS features to optimize buffer management for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and eventually the next generation of Ethernet speeds.
wp_BufferMgmt.pdf 233.09 kB
Introducing a Second Network Vendor Saves Money...
Introducing a Second Network Vendor Saves Money and Solidifies Operations.
Gartner clients are increasingly expressing interest in adding a second vendor to their Enterprise network infrastructures to achieve competitive leverage and avoid vendor lock-in. However, they are concerned that this will multiply the complexity of their network operations. With adequate foresight in addressing specific operational considerations, successful integration of a second vendor can be achieved with little operational risk.
Gartner - Second Network Vendor.pdf 147.68 kB
Open Automation Framework
OA_Update_v1-5.pdf 285.66 kB
Products
Open Automation and Virtualization Framework
Force10’s Open Automation and Virtualization Framework is designed to transform the data center network into a policy-driven, cloud computing fabric, and provide network managers greater visibility into how the network is performing. Open Automation incorporates HyperLink and SwitchLink, two elements within the modular Force10 Operating System (FTOS) software that streamline the network fabric’s ability to participate in automated, policy-driven, real-time workload allocation in response to changing application and service demands.
VirtualControl, VirtualScale and VirtualView are a suite of network management and architectural tools that promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. Together, Open Automation and the Virtualization Framework leverage the company’s extensive Technology Alliance Partner Program that today includes more than 25 data center-related technology partners to provide the foundation for dynamic data centers by aligning compute resources with resource needs.
F10_FTOS.pdf 124.78 kB
S7000 • Next-Generation 10/40 GbE Top-of-Rack System
F10_S7000_Data_Sheet.pdf 191.84 kB
Z9000 • Plug-n-Play Core for Next Generation Data Center
F10_ZSDS01_v1.0.pdf 165.03 kB
S55 High-Performance 1/10 GbE Top-of-Rack Switch
Force10_S55_DS.pdf 136.86 kB
S60 High-Performance 1/10 GbE Access Switch
Force10_S60.pdf 137.24 kB
S4810 High-Performance 10/40 GbE Top-of-Rack Switch
Force10_S4810_DS.pdf 133.97 kB
