Cavium,
a provider of semiconductor products designed to enable secure, intelligent
packet processing, and Elenion Technologies, a developer of silicon photonics
technology, announced an end-to-end reference architecture for use in enterprise
and cloud data centres.
Integrating Cavium's QLogic network interface cards (NICs)
and XPliant-based switches, with Elenion's silicon photonics on-board optics,
the direct fibre-to-the-server and parallel multi-channel on-board solution for
switches is designed to provide increased bandwidth to the server, aggregation
at 400 Gbit/s and beyond, lower power consumption and offer a path to achieving
the target of less than $1 per Gbit.
For the joint solution, Cavium is contributing its QLogic
high performance, multi-protocol Ethernet adapters, which support 10/25/40/100 Gbit/s
speeds, and the XPliant Ethernet switch family, providing a high throughput,
programmable data centre switching solution.
Cavium noted that platforms based on the XPliant Ethernet switches
are able to leverage its programmatic control of table resources and pipeline
logic to address the specific needs of the network architecture, while also providing
a high degree of packet visibility and telemetry.
Cavium and Elenion are displaying the reference design for
fibre-to-the-server solutions during OFC 2017 in Los Angeles. A demonstration based
on Elenion's next-generation photonics platform and packaging technology, combined
with the Cavium solutions, showcases advanced on-board transceivers with light
sources integrated onto the silicon photonics to enable a scalable, cost
disruptive on-board solutions for NIC and switch applications within the data
centre.
Recently, Coriant introduced a short reach CFP2-ACO
pluggable module for its Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform (NDP) that
included silicon photonics technology from Elenion, The Groove short reach
CFP2-ACO pluggable is designed to enable cost-optimised, power-efficient 200
Gbit/s connectivity for carrier transport and DCI applications.
