Huawei has made an aggressive move in the enterprise data center space with the introduction of the CloudEngine series of switches. The company touts the CloudEngine switches as possessing the largest single-frame switching capacity -- up to 48 Tbits.
The CloudEngine series offers high-density switching of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE), 40GbE, 10GbE and GbE interfaces to support virtualization as well as computing, storage, and network convergence. The CloudEngine series includes the CE12800 core switches as well as CE6800 and CE5800 top of rack switches.
Huawei asserts the following features should ensure the CloudEngine switches make an impact:
- A non-blocking CLOS fabric architecture and large distributed buffers efficiently process traffic bursts.
- An improved power and cooling system that includes a front-to-rear ventilation channel design improves heat dissipation.
- The Cluster Switch System (CSS) feature enables virtualization of multiple switches into one logical switch. The Virtual System (VS) feature enables virtualization of one switch into multiple independent logical devices.
- Support of virtual machines by enabling network administrators to build large-scale Layer 2 networks with over 500 nodes based on TRILL – the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This feature supports fast migration and flexible service deployment, Huawei says. Meanwhile, with the use of the nCenter network management system, the CloudEngine series can achieve more than 10X the virtual parallel processing capability of the industry average, Huawei claims.
- Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support, as well as the ability to combine Priority Flow Control (PFC) with Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) to ensure non-blocking transmission.
"The deployment of cloud-based services brings with it extreme network challenges in the areas of traffic growth, service scale and manageability,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst, ZK Research. “With the announcement of the Cloud Fabric Architecture and CloudEngine 12800 series, Huawei is addressing the needs of this environment by providing customers a solid reference architecture and a highly scalable, converged, and fully virtualized platform. This innovative approach will provide mid market through high end enterprise customers the foundation for a customizable network environment managed with a single fabric interface."