John Walko

LONDON Switching fabric and traffic management system specialist Dune Networks has started sampling a carrier-class reference system dubbed Gobi.

The design is built around Dune Networks' Sand (Scalable Architecture for Networking Devices) core technology. Targeted at modular chassis-based, communication-type platforms, Sand provides a solution for switching fabrics, traffic management and scheduling.

The Gobi reference system uses a mid-plane design. Up to 16 line cards can be plugged at the front, each providing up to 80Gbit/s of bandwidth. At the rear, the design can be populated with up to 8 fabric cards providing full-duplex non-blocking switching capacity of up to 1.28Tbit/s user bandwidth with 25 percent of switching fabric redundancy.

Continuing the analogy with the sand factor, the smaller version of the reference system is called Negev.

The Gobi chassis was designed to be configured to work in a multi-chassis configuration, so can scale up from one to hundreds of high bandwidth line cards.

The switching cards utilize Dune's FE200 device. Four fabric cards are utilized in a 640Gbit/s configuration with 3+1 redundancy, while a 1.28Tbit/s configuration with 6+2 redundancy utilizes 8 fabric cards.

"Although the SAND chipset enables both lower and higher capacity modular chassis designs, the maximum density of a single chassis using today's technology is always an open design question. The Gobi reference system demonstrates that 1.28Tbit/s capacity solutions are feasible with today's commercially available technology," commented Ofer Iny, CTO of Dune Networks (Sunnyvale California). Iny added the reference platform demonstrates that a system built using the SAND chipset can address the needs of enterprises and data centers, while meeting traffic management requirements in the metro, core and edge networks, where compliance to specifications from Metro Ethernet Forum and other standard bodies is required.