Fulcrum's Alta switch chips add programmable pipeline to keep pace with standards

Briefing:  Data centre switching 

Part 2: Ethernet switch chips

Fulcrum Microsystems has announced its latest FocalPoint chip family of Ethernet switches. The Alta FM6000 series family supports up to 72 10-Gigabit ports and can process over one billion packets a second.

“Instead of every top-of-rack switch having a CPU subsystem, you could put all the horsepower into a set of server blades”

Gary Lee, Fulcrum Microsystems

The company’s Alta FM6000 series is its third generation of FocalPoint Ethernet switches. Based on a 65nm CMOS process, the Alta switch architecture includes a programmable packet-processing pipeline that can support emerging standards for data centre networking. These include Data Center Bridging (DCB), Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), and two server virtualisation protocols: the IEEE 802.1Qbg Edge Virtual Bridging and the IEEE 802.1Qbh Bridge Port Extension. 

Why is this important?

Data centre networking is undergoing a period of upheaval due to server virtualisation. Data centre operators must cope with the changing nature of traffic flows, as the predominant traffic becomes server-to-server (east-west traffic) rather than between the servers and end users (north-south).

In turn, IT staff want to consolidate the multiple networks they must manage - for LAN, storage and high-performance computing - onto a single network based on DCB. 

They also want to reduce the number of switch platforms they must manage. This is leading switch vendors to develop larger, flatter architectures; instead of the traditional three tiers of switches, vendors are developing sleeker two-tier and even a single-layer, logical switch architecture that spans the data centre. 

“There are people out there that have enterprise gear where their data centre connection has to go through the access, aggregation and core [switches],” says Gary Lee, director of product marketing at Fulcrum Microsystems. “They may not want to swap out that gear so they are going to continue to have three tiers even if it is not that efficient.”

But other customers such as large cloud computing players do not require such a switch hierarchy and its associated software complexity, says Lee: “They are the ones that are driving to a ‘lean core’, made up of top-of-rack and the end-of-row switch that acts as a core switch.”

Switch vendor Voltaire, a customer of Fulcrum’s ICs, uses such an arrangement to create 288 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports based on two tiers of 24-port switch chips. With the latest 72-port FM6000 series, a two-tier architecture with over 2,500 10-Gigabit ports becomes possible. “The software can treat the entire structure of chips as a single large virtual switch,” says Lee.

Alta architecture

Fulcrum's Alta FM6000 series architecture. Source: Fulcrum MicrosystemsFulcrum’s FocalPoint 6000 series comprises nine devices with capacities from 160 to 720 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps).  The Alta chip architecture has three main components:

• Input-output ports
• RapidArray shared memory and
• the FlexPipe array pipeline.

Like Fulcrum’s second generation Bali architecture, the 6000 series has 96 serial/ deserialiser (serdes) ports but these have been upgraded from 3.125Gbps to 10Gbps.“We have very flexible port logic,” says Lee. “We can group four serdes to create a XAUI [10 Gigabit Ethernet] port or create an IEEE 40 Gigabit Ethernet port.”

RapidArray is a single shared memory which can be written to and read from at full line rate from all the ports simultaneous, says Fulcrum. Each memory output port has a set of eight class-of-service queues, while the shared memory can be partitioned to separate storage traffic from data traffic.

“The shared memory design is where we get the low latency, and good multicast performance which people in the broadband access market like for video distribution,” says Lee.

The architecture’s third main functional block is the FlexPipe array pipeline. The pipeline, new to Alta, is what enables up to a billion 64 byte packets to be processed each second.  The packet-processing pipeline combines look-up tables and microcode-programmable functional blocks that process a packet’s fields. Being able to program the array pipeline means the device can accommodate standards’ changes as they evolve, as well as switch vendors’ proprietary protocols.

OpenFlow

The FocalPoint software development kit that comes with the chips supports OpenFlow. OpenFlow is an academic initiative that allows networking protocols to be explored using existing hardware but it is of growing interest to data centre operators.

“It creates an industry-standard application programming interface (API) to the switches,” explains Lee. It would allow the likes of a Google or a Yahoo! to switch vendors’ switch platforms as long as both vendors supported OpenFlow.

OpenFlow also establishes the idea of a central controller that would run on a server to configure the network. “Instead of every top-of-rack switch having a CPU subsystem, you could put all the horsepower into a set of server blades,” says Lee. This promises to lower the cost of switches and more importantly enable operators to unshackle themselves from switch vendors’ software.

Lee points out that OpenFlow is still in its infancy. But Fulcrum has added an ‘OpenFlow vSwitch stub’ to its software that translates between OpenFlow APIs and FocalPoint APIs.

What next?

Fulcrum says it continues to monitor the various evolving standards such as DCB, TRILL and the virtualisation work. Fulcrum is also getting requests to support latency measurement on its chips using techniques such as synchronous Ethernet to ensure service level agreements are met.

As for future FocalPoint designs, these will have greater throughput, with larger table sizes, packet buffers and higher-speed 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Meanwhile all nine FM6000 series’ chip members will be available from the second quarter, 2011.

Click here for Part 1: Single-layer switch architectures

Click here for Part 3: Networking developments