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Force10

Dell Force10 Networks
TypeSubsidiary of Dell, Inc.
IndustryNetwork switches
FateAcquired by Dell
FoundednCore Networks
Founder(s)PK Dubey, Naresh Nigam and Som Sikdar
HeadquartersSan Jose, California, United States
Area servedworldwide
ParentDell, Inc.

Dell Force10 Networks (formerly nCore Networks, Force10 Networks), is a United States company that develops and markets 10 Gigabit and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches for computer networking to corporate, educational, and governmental customers. It has offices in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region.

In August 2011, Dell completed the acquisition of Force10 and changed the name to Dell Force10.[1]

Contents

History

Founding

The company was founded by PK Dubey, Naresh Nigam and Som Sikdar. It was named by founder Som Sikdar, an avid sailor, after Beaufort Force 10 (Storm, Whole gale) on the Beaufort scale for wind speeds, indicating a storm with high speed winds, and matched their focus on 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing products.

Acquisition

In January 2009, Force10 merged with Turin Networks, which had previously purchased Carrier Access Corporation and White Rock Networks. Carrier Access Corporation itself had previously purchased Mangrove Systems and White Rock Networks had previously purchased Seranoa Networks.

On July 20, 2011 Dell announced it intended to fully acquire Force10 for an undisclosed amount. With the acquisition, Dell offers a complete range of products for the datacentre[1][2][3] where Dell focusses on the ethernet switches. Dell Force10 will continue to offer their non-ethernet backhaul and metro-access platforms as well.

Products

In January 2002, Force10 released the E-Series E1200 switch/router, claiming line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching. Force10 Networks hoped to expand from LAN switching to midsize data centers and enterprise campus networks. The Force10 product portfolio included the E-Series family of switch/routers, the C300 switch, the S-Series family of access switches and the P-Series security appliances.

In 2007 it was actively working on 100 Gigabit Ethernet Switching.[4]

Force10 Networks uses NetBSD as the underlying operating system that powers FTOS (the Force10 Operating System).[5] Force10 made a donation to the NetBSD Foundation in 2007 to help further research and the open development community.

Since Jan 19, 2012, the product-range of Force-10 are now available as 'normal' Dell products and newly ordered products are sold with the Dell logo and colours.[6]

Current product-lines

Force10 Networks has several product lines: their ethernet switches, in 4 series, see below. And apart form that they offer networking equipment for telecommunication providers and metropolitan networks:

  • Ethernet switches
  • Traverse series: Multiservice transport switches: Chassis based multi service platform offering SDH/SONET services, carrier ethernet and DCS or cellular services. The chassis range from 6 to 20 slots with up to 95 Gbps per shelf[7]
  • Master series: a backhaul platform for mobile/cellular networks. The Master series exists of a 2 slot (1 Rack unit high) or a 3 RU - 8 slot chassis offering backhaul services for 2G to 3G GSM network[8]
  • Axxius platform: a backhaul platform for both GSM and UMTS cellular networks over E1 {SDH} or T1 (SONET) network[9]
  • Adit 600: Access platform for carrier grade (IP) networks offering an access platform for telecommunication providers to give their customers generic access to their NextGen network[10]
  • TransNav: Force10 TransNav management platform to manage Metropolitan area networks[11]

Ethernet switches

Besides the different access and backhaul platforms the main product line for Dell Force10 are their ethernet switches divided in 4 product series:[12]

  • Z series: Datacenter distributed core switches: 1 model, the Z9000, 2 RU high with 40 Gbit/s QSFP+ Ethernet ports for datacenter usage offering 2,5 Tbps switching capacity on 32 port at 40Gbps or up to 128 ports at 10Gbps using QSFP+ - 4 SFP+ 10Gbps splitters.[13][14]
  • C series: Datacenter/core chassis based switches: 2 models,C150 (9RU) and C300 (13RU) for 1 and 10 Gbit/s
  • E series: Virtualized core chassis based switches. campus, office or datacenter aggregation/core switches: 3 models for 1 and 10 Gbit/s aggregation
  • S series: Edge-switches: 8 models 1RU or 2RU for 1 and 10 Gbit/s ethernet[15]

S Series

The S series ethernet switches is a range of switches offering 1G or 10Gbps ports in 1U or 2U form factor.[16] The S-series start at the S25 series with 24 1Gbps ports with (S25V) Power over ethernet, S25N copper ports or S25V fibre/SFP ports. Apart from that the switches offer several uplink options The S50 series is very similar to the S25 exceot that the S50 offers 48 ports.

Following the S25 and S50 are several types as S55 and S60, also offering 1Gbps access ports and 10Gbps uplink ports where each model has a speciality, such as very low latency (<5 micro seconds latency per 64 bytes frames on S25/S50 or 800 nano seconds on S4810) or very deep data-buffers (S60).

The top of range switches are the S4810[17] (fiber) or S4820[18] (copper) with 48 x 10Gbps SFP+ (S4810) or 10GBaseT (S4820) and 4 QSFP+ 40Gbps uplink ports. The S4800 series are marketed as distribution switches for both datacenter as campus networks ofr large networks or (collapsed) core switches for smaller networks. The S4800 series switches can be stacked using either 10Gbps or 40Gbps ports using fiber links or copper/twinax based direct attached ports. The pass-through latency ranges from 800 nano seconds for the S4810 to 3,3 micro seconds for the copper based S4820.[16] The S4810, S4820 and the MXL or M-I/O swithces use the Broadcom Trident+ ASIC. This is the same ASIC as used in the Dell PowerConnect 8100 series but running the FTOS operating system, while the PowerConnect 8100 series runs a Broadcom built firmware.

Dell Force10 also offers a FTOS based blade switch: Force10 MXL 10/40 Gbit/s switch for their M1000e blade enclosure, available since the second half of 2012.[19][20] The MXL switch is a S4810 switch in chassis form-factor offering 32 internal 10Gbps 10 GBase-KR ports, 2 external 40Gbps (uplink or stack) ports and 2 expansion slots for 2 ports QSFP+ 40Gbps ports or 4 port 10Gbps SFP+ or 10GBaseT copper ports for uplinks or stacking.

Apart from the MXL multi-layer switches Dell also offers the IO Aggregator offering 32 x 10Gbase KR internal ports and 2 x 40Gbps QSFP+ uplink ports and 2 slots for either dual port QSFP+ or quad port SFP+ fiber or 10GBaseT copper uplink ports[21]

All above Dell Force10 series ethernet switches run the FTOS or Force10 Operating System.

Architecture

All 10Gbps products lines, except for the E-series, use the Broadcom Trident+ ASICs or other Broadcom based Asics for the 1G models. The E-series use a Force10 propriatary ASIC. All layer2 / layer3 switches in a spine/leaf architecture.[22] This architecture is used within a switch, where the communication goes via the internal backplane and the concept of the Z-series uses the same system for the distributed core between the switches.[22][23] The switches that offer 40Gbit/s interfaces can use these ports for 40Gbit/s switch to switch links or split such a link in 4 x 10Gbit/s direct attached links or fibre optic cable to other switches or 10Gbit/s NIC's

Chassis switches

The Z-series and S-series are 1 RU or 2 RU stand-alone switches where the E- and C-series are chassis based switches. The chassis based switches all use a 100% passive backplane: according to the company this results in a backplane that is more energy efficient and allows to use the same backplane for much higher speeds: the company uses the same backplane when the maximum speed of ports was 10Gbit/s as the current 40Gbit/s and is ready for 100Gbit/s. The backplane designed for their Terascale switches in 2004[24] is the same as the current (2012) Exascale systems. The clockspeed used on the backplane is governed by the routing or switching-modules. The lack of any active components on the backplane allows this[25]

Power consumption

The chassis based datacenter core-switches (E-series) uses far less power then direct competitors like the Cisco Nexus 7000 or the Juniper EX8216: fully utilized with 1Gbit/s ports the Force10 E1200i uses 4.77 Watt per Gbps throughput where the Nexus uses 9.28 Watt and Juniper 6.15. Similar differences can also be seen when using all 10Gbit/s ports (F10: 3.34 Watt per Gbps, Nexus: 7.59 Watt and Juniper 4.69 Watt][26]

Customers

Force10 customers include enterprises in industries such as media, financial services, oil and gas, Web 2.0 and gaming. Service providers, including Internet exchanges, wholesale providers, cable operators, and content delivery providers. Force10 customers include Google, Facebook, Lexis Nexis, Zynga, Level(3), TATA Communications (formerly VSNL, Teleglobe), Mzima Networks, Stealth Communications,[27] Yahoo!, isoHunt, Sega, NYSE Euronext, Veritas DGC, Equinix, CERN,[28] NOAA, University College London Networks Research Group,[29] and the Baylor College of Medicine.[30]

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Chris Mellor (July 20, 2011). "Dell buys Force 10 Networks: Storm winds to leave Brocade out in the cold?". The Register. Retrieved August 8, 2011. 
  2. ^ Agam Shah (July 20, 2011). "Dell fills data center technology stack with Force10". ComputerWorld. IDG. Retrieved August 8, 2011. 
  3. ^ Larry Dignan (July 20, 2011). "Dell goes networking, acquires Force10". CNET news. Retrieved August 9, 2011. 
  4. ^ InternetNews Realtime IT News – An Ethernet Force to be Patented
  5. ^ "Force10 Networks Introduces Unified Operating System Across Product Portfolio to Lower Total Cost of Owning and Operating Networks". News release (Force10 Networks). January 28, 2008. Retrieved August 8, 2011. 
  6. ^ F10 switches in Dell 'livery'., visited 21-1-2012
  7. ^ Dell Force10 product pages on the Traverse series, visited 19 Februari, 2013
  8. ^ Dell Force10 product page on Master series, visited: 19 Februari, 2013
  9. ^ Accius 800 product page, visited: 19 Februari, 2013
  10. ^ Datasheet for the Adit 600 platform, downloaded: 18 Februari, 2013
  11. ^ Datasheet for the TransNav management system, downloaded: 19 Februari, 2013
  12. ^ Dell products Force10 Datacenter networking, visited 18 February 2013
  13. ^ The Register Force10 cranks Ethernet switches to 40 Gigabits, 26 April 2011. Visited 18 May 2012
  14. ^ Video on the Z9000 switch, visited 18 February 2013
  15. ^ Dell product website ethernet products Force10 S series, visited 21 Januari, 2012
  16. ^ a b Product page on the Force10 S-series switches, visited: 19 February 2013
  17. ^ S4810 datasheet, downloaded 18 February 2013
  18. ^ S4820 datasheet, downloaded 19 February 2013
  19. ^ Dell product page on the MXL blade switch, visited 19 February 2013
  20. ^ Outlook series: F10 MXL for M1000e blade system, 24 April 2012, visited 18 February 2013]
  21. ^ Dell product page on the M-I/O Aggregator, visited: 19 February 2013
  22. ^ a b Jason Edelman Blog on 40 Gbps datacenter switching, 10 December 2011. Retrieved 17 May 2012
  23. ^ Product details of the Force10 Z9000 switch, visited 18 May 2012
  24. ^ EETimes F10 moves to terascale backplane, retrieved 18 May 2012
  25. ^ F10 press-release F10 granted two patents for backplane, 2 October 2006. Visited 18 May 2012
  26. ^ TMC Net website on Green Datacentre: Tolly Group highlights F10 low power consumption, 10 September 2010. Visited 18 May 2012
  27. ^ STEALTH COMMUNICATIONS DEPLOYS FORCE10 E-SERIES IN NEW YORK PEERING EXCHANGE TO INTERCONNECT 200 VOICE AND DATA PROVIDERS
  28. ^ CERN LHC uses Force10 switches, visited 21 Januari, 2012
  29. ^ HEN - Heterogeneous Experimental Network
  30. ^ Silicon Valley's next payday, CNNMoney.com, Om Malik, June 19, 2006, accessed August 14, 2007

External links

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