Today Avago Technologies announced full production of its new PEX9700 series of third generation switches. Avago claims that this new switch technology will enable organizations to converge their servers, storage, and network devices through PCIe. The new PEX9700 series will have seven models ranging from 12-Lanes/5-Ports to 97-Lanes/25-Ports.
Today Avago Technologies announced full production of its new PEX9700 series of third generation switches. Avago claims that this new switch technology will enable organizations to converge their servers, storage, and network devices through PCIe. The new PEX9700 series will have seven models ranging from 12-Lanes/5-Ports to 97-Lanes/25-Ports.
Organizations are looking for ways in which their data centers can meet the needs of hyperscale and data intensive applications while managing costs and power consumption. One attractive method is using PCIe for interconnect to in-rack devices. PCIe is cheaper, more efficient, and has better performance. PCIe is generally used for internal devices. Avago’s new PEX3700 technology allows devices in a hyperscale system, NVMe enclosure, and rack-scale-based subsystems to communicate through high-performance PCIe fabric. This should reduce costs and power consumption by up to 50% compared with traditional connectivity.
Not only will the PEX9700 reduce costs, simplify connectivity, and increase performance (up to 1.5Tb/s through 97 lanes in full-duplex mode), the PEX9700 will also enable high availability with host and fabric redundancy (if one host fails the other host still has access to all features). The PEX9700 also enables high availability compute, scalable GPGPU for deployment of HPC, and shared storage connectivity.
New features include:
- Tunneled Windows Connection – Interconnect up to 24 (+1 management host) nodes on a single chip or cascade multiple chips to connect up to 72 nodes with no performance loss
- Embedded DMA Engines – Equips each port with a NIC-DMA engine that enables efficient data transfers between multiple hosts
- Shared I/O – Enables endpoints to be shared among multiple hosts to maximize system resource efficiency and reduce cost and power
- Flexible Port Configuration – Allows up to 23 endpoints to be combined with ports as wide as 16 lanes, providing nearly 16GB/s of bandwidth on each link
- Downstream Port Containment – Isolates errors in any endpoint from bringing down the entire system
- Dedicated Port Management – Enables software control of switch features for customized implementations using Avago-developed software modules
Availability
Avago is shipping, in full production, the PEX9700 Series of ExpressFabric products to leading OEMs.
