Tech Field Day 11 Preview: Plexxi
Tech Field Day 11 is happening in Boston, from 22-24 June and I’m super happy to be invited as a delegate.
I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: I’m heading to Tech Field Day 11 and DockerCon!
Plexxi
Plexxi is a still a newish company that has previously presented at Networking Field Days 5, 6, and 7 and was started by some clever brains who want to make the life of who they term a “Network Cloud Builder” easier.
Plexxi has three parts to its solution.
Plexxi Switch is an Ethernet Switch which is connected to a bunch of other switches in a physical ring with a clever optical multiplexed connector that means they act as if they were fully meshed without all the cabling. When a switch receives an optical signal from a neighbour switch it basically either terminates the optical signal for traffic destined for the switch it has just arrived at or optically passively passes it through to the next switch in the ring without having to actually switch it.
Think how useful this is for reducing latency if you don’t have to actually switch traffic at every switch you pass through, great for even high frequency trading. Plexxi calls this LightRail. You can talk directly to switches 5 along either side of you in this way with the equivalent of 20Gb direct bandwidth between every two switch (its like a mesh remember) but with far less cabling as the multiplex cable can carry all the signals for all the switches. If you need more or your bandwidth between any two pairs of switches creates contention it can then change into switching mode. I think I have this right but happy to be corrected.
Oh, did I mention these optical connections can be up to 10km in length, so strung together your span can be up to 80km, interested yet? This gives you an 11xswitch 20Gb fully meshed topology. It uses Broadcom’s commodity Trident II chipsets which are fairly common in the switching market. You can also use a pod like architecture to create a 6 switch LightRail ring which acts as a single leaf switch which can then be connected up to an Optical Spine Layer (OSL). Multiple LightRail pods can be connected to the OSLs. This can scale out to 6 x 12 rack rows which could give you up to 2448 10xGbE ports! This drastically reduces the need for north-south switching connections and increases the east-west connectivity where your servers actually want to talk to each other.
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