Liftoff for 10 GigE content networks

We kick off 10 GigE week with a product announcement. Today Solace announced a new 10 GigE Network Acceleration Blade (NAB), along with some new 10 GigE messaging benchmarks conducted with our partners Arista and NetEffect.

As a recap, the Solace 3260 content router is a high-speed content routing chassis that houses a different set of hardware blades depending on the type of messaging or middleware function your applications require. No matter what type of messaging you’re doing, every blade combination starts with a Network Acceleration Blade or NAB. The NAB is the shared I/O blade that performs a wide range of functions in hardware. Each NAB:

• terminates Ethernet, IP and TCP in hardware
• terminates the messaging protocols in hardware
• can compress WAN traffic in hardware
• efficiently manages publish/subscribe content fanout
• tracks detailed statistics about client and server connections, queue depths and message rates without negatively impacting performance

This new announcement is the third NAB (network blade) in the lineup, the first to support 10 GigE networks.

Customers can now choose from:

• a 4×1 GigE NAB that has 4 physical 1 GigE ports for throughput of up to 4 gigs. Each port can be an individual port, or they can be link aggregated as one logical higher capacity link.
• an 8×1 GigE NAB that has 8 physical 1 GigE ports for throughput of up to 8 gigs. Likewise offers the same link aggregation feature as the 4×1 NAB.
• a 2×10 GigE NAB that has 2 physical 10 GigE ports. One port is active providing a full 10 gigs of throughput, and the second is a backup for redundancy (using Ethernet bonding).

The past six months have seen an acceleration of 10 GigE network adoption shifting from use in early adopters and test environments towards live production networks. With this full lineup of I/O blades, Solace content routers can now fully leverage any kind of Ethernet network at rates as high as 10 million messages per second (5 million in and 5 million out). The new blade is immediately useful to 10 GigE network users and provides a seamless messaging infrastructure upgrade path for today’s 1 GigE users.

In the next post, we will highlight the benchmarking results at 500K, 1M and 2M messages per second end-to-end. 10 GigE infrastructure shaves off valuable microseconds from the already excellent performance seen on 1 GigE networks, while also reducing jitter. Check back in later today for more.