Big new switch hits the datacentre

You won't have read about this in many places but there's a humongous new enterprise-level switch in town.

Alcatel-Lucent has just released news of the OmniSwitch 10K, a chassis-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) switch aimed at the datacentre. In Al-Lu's marketing-speak, it "sets a new standard in non-blocking switch capacity, port density, low power consumption and price per port".

The company claims the modular device offers 5Tbps wire rate switching, with up to 256 10GigE ports while consuming under 1.5W per Gbps bandwidth, which Al-Lu reckons is the best on the market. Whether that's true will emerge over time - but it seems just about to match the claims of competitor Arista's flagship 7500 switching system -- although Arista claims that box offers up to 384 ports and a 10Tbps backplane.

Other key competitors include Juniper and Cisco whose EX8208 and Nexus 7010 respectively offer lower switching speeds and fewer ports.

In terms of other features, the switch offers what Al-Lu calls "unique virtual queuing technology that enables fine-tuned application delivery control that prioritizes [sic] traffic".

Alcatel-Lucent's been bit quiet on the enterprise switching front in recent times -- in fact this appears to be its first burst of activity in about two years -- so maybe this presages a renewed focus on the enterprise datacentre. There's more detail here.