Broadcom Solidifies Leadership in End-to-End 10GbE Data Center Solutions

Data centers host all Web content and critical business assets and, as such, 10GbE connectivity is crucial in meeting capacity requirements. Broadcom's new 10GbE switch provides data centers with greater density at a lower power. This enables cooler operations that better support a fluctuating volume of users due to the rich multimedia content associated with Web 2.0, online video-on-demand, social networking and interactive gaming. By upgrading its data center with Broadcom's 65nm 10GbE switches, a single 40,000 square foot data center could save enough power annually to light the Las Vegas strip for 12 hours.

Broadcom was the first to introduce 10GbE switching silicon in 2002 and continues to be the only chip company in the world that can provide the major networking components (switches, physical layer devices, controllers and serializers/deserializers) needed to build a complete 10GbE-based data center. Data center traffic can now easily migrate from GbE to 10GbE, with storage, clustering, voice, video and data converged onto a single 10GbE unified network fabric. This converged environment facilitates network virtualization eliminating the need for deploying and maintaining separate, disparate fabrics such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand® and others. As a result, Broadcom is uniquely positioned to benefit from the significant growth taking place in the data center market.

People today are accessing diverse types of content at a greater rate than ever before. Regardless of the activity, the content from photos and video to software applications and online gaming primarily resides in the data center and is accessed remotely. 10GbE is crucial to meet the bandwidth requirements since GbE can no longer handle the increased network traffic. Data center expansion and scalability is also necessary to support popular online activities such as social networking and streaming video. These activities, like the release of a hot new music video or an online movie, can cause a spontaneous influx of millions of simultaneous users creating situations where the data center must scale quickly to support an immediate demand for content.

In the enterprise, the data center houses the company's most important assets -- its intellectual property (IP), customer databases and financial information. Access to this data, and other software services such as customer relationship management (CRM), must be reliable, secure and available 24/7 to support a large worldwide workforce.

Announced today is the Broadcom BCM56820 10GbE multi-layer switch designed to enable growth in all segments of the data center market. The BCM56820 is the latest member of the StrataXGS® Ethernet switch family and supports the scalability necessary for Web 2.0 support, the reliability and security required for enterprise applications, as well as the bandwidth and quality of service (QoS) needed to deliver rich multimedia content such as IPTV.

"A 10GbE infrastructure incorporating the latest technology to address reliability, accessibility, scalability and security is fundamental in next- generation data centers," said Martin Lund, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Network Switching line of business. "The introduction of our cool new 10GbE switch underscores our leadership in 10GbE silicon solutions and enables the deployment of 10GbE across the enterprise without a compromise in features."

"Data centers are expanding faster than ever before due to the large volume of content and applications they are now required to support," said Vikram Mehta, President and CEO of BLADE Network Technologies. "Market leading products like Broadcom's BCM56820 will help enable our strategy to deliver server I/O fabric convergence and network virtualization to the data center. We have partnered with Broadcom to launch a dozen data center switches with another three to launch within six months, which will further our leadership position in the market."

One key feature of the BCM56820 is Broadcom's service aware flow control (SAFC) technology, which enables data center Ethernet (DCE). In this converged 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based fabric, SAFC greatly improves performance in data centers by ensuring that there is no loss of data on the network. It guarantees reliable delivery of sensitive network traffic such as storage, while extending priority access to time-critical applications such as clustering and video. -Broadcom