Traditionally, switch silicon vendors offered proprietary software interfaces, which required significant software porting from customers to create a suitable switching product for the end user. This led to a near-exclusive reliance on these existing switch silicon vendors. The Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) was conceived as an abstraction interface for application-specific switching integrated circuits (ASICs) to eliminate these barriers.
SAI allows system developers to quickly and easily port software to the best switch silicon that supports these SAI abstractions. Earlier this year, Cavium announced SAI support in the XPliant switch SDK (Software Development Kit) and has now made this software generally available. Microsoft has also ported Layer 3 BGP routing applications to the XPliant switch SDK based on the SAI interface. This software is currently running on the XPliant-based Edge Core AS7500-32X switch.
“Adopting SAI will allow customers to easily deploy silicon-based products from multiple vendors across their networks,” said Kamala Subramaniam, chief architect of Azure Networking at Microsoft. “We’re excited to see Cavium taking innovative steps to bring the benefits of SAI, including increased network agility and cost savings, to customers in their flexible XPliant silicon-based product.”
“We’re proud that, through our contributions to SAI, we’re contributing to Microsoft’s success in driving open networks,” said Eric Hayes, vice president and general manager of Cavium’s Switch Platform Group. “By delivering SAI through our flexible XPliant switch silicon, we believe we’ll be able to offer a more flexible and cost-effective network that will help customers and partners alike take full advantage of the agility the cloud offers.”
Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switch family is designed for cloud and enterprise data center applications, as well as service provider infrastructure, for both top-of-rack and backbone applications. The combination of leading performance and unparalleled flexibility makes it appealing to all these segments. These highly configurable Ethernet switches offer bandwidth up to 3.2 terabits per second on monolithic silicon and support 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, and 100G interfaces. This switch family will also provide connectivity solutions for embedded applications.
Equinix selects Infinera Cloud Xpress for data center interconnection in Hong Kong
Infinera announces that Equinix has selected Infinera Cloud Xpress to interconnect its data centers in Hong Kong. Infinera Cloud Xpress offers Equinix a platform with hyperscale density, operational simplicity, and low power consumption.
