Competitive vendor analysis: 10GbE and 40GbE switches by chassis and rack

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Competitive vendor analysis: 10GbE and 40GbE switches by chassis and rack

A comparison of the Arista 7508, Brocade MLXe-8, Cisco Nexus 7010, Dell Force 10 E600i, Extreme BlackDiamond 8810, Extreme BlackDiamond X8, HP 12508, Juniper EX8208 and the Juniper QFX3008 switches.

Wed, 2/22/12 - 8:11pm View comments

I'm Darius Goodall, the Director of Product and Technical Marketing for Extreme Networks, an enterprise and service provider networking vendor.

Well, here's my comparison of the following vendor switches:

Arista 7508, Brocade MLXe-8, Cisco Nexus 7010, Dell Force 10 E600i, Extreme BlackDiamond 8810, Extreme BlackDiamond X8, HP 12508, Juniper EX8208 and the Juniper QFX3008.

BlackDiamond X8 - Fastest Switch in the Industry

The BlackDiamond X8 is built with cloud data centers in mind. With its highly packed design, the BlackDiamond X8 takes only one third of a server rack to provision up to 768 wire-speed 10GbE ports and up to 192 wire-speed 40GbE ports. And the BlackDiamond X8 has ample capacity to switch all those ports at wire-speed with more than 20Tbps switching throughput. With this performance and capacity 128,000 virtual machines can be supported with a single BlackDiamond X8, and VMs can be migrated and tracked through XNV (ExtremeXOS Network Virtualization) and Virtual Port Profiles features (view XNV demo video 1 and demo video 2). Further, the BlackDiamond X8 open standards-based Data Center Bridging (DCB) is ideal for converged and IP-based storage services.

Being the fastest switch in the industry, as proven by the results of the recent the Lippis Report Evaluation, BlackDiamond X8 switches those packets with lowest latency of only 2.3 uSec port-to-port. The BlackDiamond X8 is built with data center class availability and efficiency in mind. The switch supports a 1+1 control plane, N+1 data plane and N+N power plane redundancy making it extremely resilient against failures. At the same time, its front to back cooling design with innovative, mid-plane less design and intelligent controls, it consumes only 5.62 W/10GbE port, making it the most power efficient switch in its class:

Vendor Comparison by Chassis

Below I'm showcasing the density of the BlackDiamond X8 (view its tech specs). Stacking each of the 8-slot competitive offerings for chassis switches in an apple-to-apple comparison, and ranking it for 10GbE and 40GbE wire-speed ports and oversubscribed ports, the BlackDiamond X8 leads in terms of the port density, double that of the highest and closet competitor. This clearly shows the leadership of BlackDiamond X8 in modular data center products:

Vendor Comparison by 10 GE Rack

And taking the per rack capacities discussed forward and applying them to data center consolidation, this is another way of looking at it. Below I'm showcasing how many racks from each vendor will be needed to match the 10GbE port density supported by the BlackDiamond X8 into a single rack.

Three points:

First, this saves a lot in terms of rack space and floor space savings in a multi-tenant or cloud environment, providing as much as 18X better consolidation.

Second, it saves a lot in terms of power and cooling expenses that would rather be needed to power up those additional racks, and even the saving for that single rack as shown by the power charts on top right.

And third, for cloud providers, each of that additional rack space can be used to provision more server, storage or networking gear to host more applications or to provision more services, which means more revenue. Zero lost opportunity cost.