A Big 40 GbE Switch for Big Data and the Cloud

Gnodal launched a 40 GbE 2RU switch at Interop in Las Vegas last week.

The company's new flagship, the GS0072, supports 40 GbE and integrates 72 QSFP ports (or 288 SFP+ ports with breakout cables) to address the requirements of data centers that focus on cloud and big data applications. Thanks to congestion management and dynamic load-balancing, the manufacturers said that the device can operate "at near 100 percent" throughput.

The aggregate bandwidth of one 2RU switch is 5.8 Tb/s with a forwarding capacity of "more than" 4.3 Bpps.

According to Gnodal, the new switch targets environments that need 10 GbE edge connectivity for large numbers of virtual clients as well HPC applications that call for 40 Gbps capability. The GS0072 features an initial port-to-port latency as low as 282 ns and additional hops at 66 ns.

Gnodal explained that the architecture enables multi-stage networks with "thousands of ports" with an overall system latency of just 414 ns. Through a combination of other Gnodal switches, the GS-Series can support a network of up to 64,000 ports.