Extreme unveils new 10-Gb/s switch

Extreme Networks today unveiled a new 10-Gb/s switch that it claims has the greatest gigabit and 10-gigabit port densities in the industry. But the vendor is touting the platform's features and expandability as a differentiator over competitors that it said have only focused on increasing bandwidth. 

The Black Diamond 10K, which is shipping commercially this week, includes an all-new open-source operating system and six new ASICs, the company said. It contains 1.6 Tb/s of capacity and 48 10-GigE ports (or 480 1-Gb/s ports) per chassis.

“It’s a big deal,” said Current Analysis analyst Joel Conover. “The Black Diamond 10K will end up being, as far as I’m aware, the fastest—or one of the fastest—switching platforms available on the general market today.”

One of the cornerstones of the new offering is its operating software, a new system called ExtremeWare XOS. Based on XML, a derivative of open-source Unix, the system is highly adaptable and delivers features that other developers of real-time operations support systems don’t, including protected memory space and the ability to kill and restart processes.

“Most of the other vendors running a real-time OS as their base software support don’t have the ability to do the things Extreme is claiming they can do with their new XOS software,” Conover said. However, although ExtremeWare XOS has plenty of room for functionality upgrades, it doesn’t currently have all the same functions offered by competitors such as Cisco Systems, he said. Integrated intrusion detection and content delivery networking modules, for example—both available today on Cisco’s 6500 platform—are still on the Extreme drawing board, according to Conover.

Extreme’s new platform also features redundant, removable switch fabrics that allow “hitless” fail-overs and software upgrades. “Extreme is the only vendor shipping a true non-stop solution,” said Timon Sloane, Extreme’s director of product management. “Our switch never needs to be taken out of service.”

It also offers hardware-based routing as an alternative to the software-based flow routing of competitors such as Foundry Networks. Hardware-based routing can scale to much higher traffic levels, Sloane said. Another feature is what Extreme calls ClearFlow, a monitoring method that allows networkers to single out the traffic of individual users for analysis rather than randomly sampling all traffic.

“It makes it possible to push back the noise in monitoring the network, allowing the network to be much more proactive in identifying anomalies,” Sloane said.

Extreme also claims to be offering the new platform at competitive per-port prices. The basic starting configuration will be sold in the United States for about $90,000—and each 10-Gb/s port will come out to about $7165, Sloane said.

An “upstart provider” in the U.S. is currently using the new system to build a 10-Gb/s native Ethernet metro ring, Sloane said. “Outside the U.S., we have incumbents aggressively embracing this technology,” he added.