Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has announced that customer shipments of SN4000 Ethernet switches have commenced. 

The SN4000 family is powered by Mellanox Spectrum-3, which the company claims is the world’s best performing, most scalable, and most flexible 12.8Tbps Ethernet switch ASIC, which is optimised for cloud, ethernet storage fabric, and AI interconnect applications.

SN4000 platforms come in flexible form-factors supporting a combination of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE. The SN4000 platforms complement the 200/400GbE SN3000 leaf switches to form a leaf/spine network. 

Mellanox Spectrum-3 supports tunneling and network virtualisation capabilities with its advanced FlexFlow packet processing technology and WJH (What Just Happened)-based real-time telemetry. Mellanox says that Spectrum-3 is ideal for building massive, high performance layer-2 and layer-3 fabrics, for both virtualised and non-virtualised use cases. 

Key features that have been highlighted by Mellanox include: 

• Up to 128 ports of 100GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE or 32 ports of 400GbE

• Up to 200,000 NAT entries, and one million on-chip routes

• Fully shared packet buffer to maximise burst absorption and deliver fair bandwidth sharing

• RoCE-Ready one-click configuration with hardware-accelerated, end-to-end congestion management to simplify networking for storage, AI, and big data workloads

• FlexFlow programmable pipeline which delivers rich network processing capabilities at an unprecedented scale

• WJH-based granular telemetry to simplify network operations and dramatically reduce mean time to issue resolution

• Simultaneous NRZ and PAM4 port speeds allowing flexible configurations

• Dual stack IPV4 and IPV6 protocol operation

• Support for overlay protocols including EVPN, VXLAN-GPE, MPLS-over-GRE/UDP, NSH, NVGRE, MPLS/IPv6 based Segment routing and more

• Flowlet-based adaptive routing maximises performance and network utilization for layer-3 fabrics with high cross-sectional bandwidth

• Support for customer-defined, on-switch, containerised microservices with complete SDK access to host management, orchestration, and telemetry applications

“Mellanox Spectrum-3 offers better performance, more advanced features, and easier management than any other 12.8 terabit switch,” said Amit Katz, vice president of Ethernet switches at Mellanox. 

“Our VXLAN support features single-pass routing for more than 500,000 tunnels, making Mellanox Spectrum-3 the best switch not only for cloud data centers, but for any networking deployment supporting virtualization, containers, or microservices.”