Greenfield
Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, unveiled
its silicon solutions designed for a new generation of
enterprise and metro/ISP edge equipment. Greenfield, which has
been operating in stealth mode since 2001, said today's Ethernet
market is sharply divided between low-end, commodity switches
with limited capabilities and high-end, ASIC driven platforms
that are really only suited for core applications. It's
"Packetry" merchant silicon offers the combination of
low-cost Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and advanced packet
processing capabilities and is targeted at four market segments:
core chassis switches, edge chassis switches, high-end fixed
Ethernet switches and WAN aggregation switches.
Key features of Greenfield's family of Ethernet switching
solutions include full IPv6 routing in hardware, extensive QoS
and security features, scalable packet buffering, and scalable
MAC, route and classification tables. Greenfield also features a
number of service provider capabilities, such as MPLS switching,
stacked VLAN support, Layer 2 VPNs, VPLS, Layer 3 VPNs and IP
tunneling.
There are three initial members of Greenfield's Packetry family:
the G525 Packet Engine, the G750 Shared Memory Fabric, and the
G120 Intelligent Multiplexer. All devices are available now.
- G525 Packet Engine: a packet processing engine capable of
wire speed operation for 16GE ports, or one 10GE/OC-192
port. The G525 packet engine provides packet processing for
Layer 2/3/4, IPv6 & MPLS, and also supports advanced
services such as QoS classification, packet filtering and
Layer 2/3 VPNs. The G525 interfaces to an external TCAM to
provide scalable MAC, IPv4/v6 route tables and
classification/filtering tables.
- G750 Shared Memory Switch Fabric: a single-chip 32G shared
memory switch fabric/traffic manager that enables a variety
of buffering and queuing functions including fair queuing,
scheduling, traffic shaping, congestion control, multicast
and resource management. The G750 provides scalable external
packet buffering up to 256MB. The G750 may be used in fixed
configuration switches or mid-range chassis systems as the
central switch fabric of the system, or in a large
distributed chassis as a traffic manager on a linecard.
- G120 Intelligent Mux -- an intelligent multiplexer device
used to develop high-density and ultra low-cost Gigabit
Ethernet linecards for edge chassis systems. The G120
supports advanced multi-tuple classification, policing, and
class-based queuing to guarantee bandwidth for high priority
traffic. The G120 can interface with up to 128MB of external
packet buffer memory to absorb short-term congestion in the
network.
- Greenfield Networks was founded in 2001 and has about 40 employees. The company is funded by Sequoia Capital, Global Catalyst Partners and Walden International.
- Greenfield Networks is headed by Gary Smerdon, who previously served as VP of Marketing at Marvell. He joined Marvell through its acquisition of Galileo Technology, another supplier of Ethernet silicon solutions.
- Greenfield's engineering team is headed by Kamran Torabi, who previously was the senior manager at Cisco Systems responsible for the design and development of the Cisco Catalyst 2900XL, 3500XL and 3550XL. He joined Cisco through its acquisition of Grand Junction in 1995.
- Greenfield's CTO is Harish Devanagondi, who is formerly from Cisco Systems, responsible for the forwarding ASICs used in the Catalyst 2900XL, 3500XL and 3550XL. He too was previously with Grand Junction.
