Cavium and Elenion Technologies Collaborate to Offer Silicon Photonics Enabled End-to-End Server-to-Switch Solutions

LOS ANGELES, CA -- Cavium, Inc. and Elenion Technologies announce an end-to-end reference architecture for Next Generation Enterprise and Cloud Data Centers incorporating Cavium's QLogic Network Interface Cards (NICs) and XPliant®-based switches, and Elenion's Silicon Photonics on-board optics. This direct fiber-to-the-server and parallel multi-channel on-board solution for switches enables increased bandwidth to the server, aggregation to 400G and beyond, lower power consumption, and a path to the industry target of < $1/Gb.

Cavium and Elenion will be showcasing their reference design for fiber-to-the-server solutions during OFC 2017 in Los Angeles (March 20-23). Cavium is contributing two important elements of this architecture. The first is Cavium's QLogic high performance multi-protocol Ethernet adapters supporting 10Gb/25Gb/40Gb/100Gb speeds and ideally suited for enterprise and cloud data centers. And the second is Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switch family, first to deliver a high throughput programmable data center switching solution that is shipping today in production. Platforms based on the XPliant Ethernet switch family leverage its programmatic control of table resources and pipeline logic to meet the specific needs of the network architecture and while providing exceptional packet visibility and telemetry. The demonstration leverages Elenion's next-generation photonics platform and packaging technology, and showcases advanced on-board transceivers with light sources integrated onto the silicon photonics. This innovative integration enables truly scalable, cost disruptive on-board solutions for NIC and switch applications within the data center (DC).

As traffic volumes within data center networks continue to scale dramatically, silicon photonics plays a key role in enabling the way data center networks are re-architected, including a move away from pluggable optics to on-board optics. On-board optics offer the benefit of improved performance and network economics.

For more information, visit
http://www.elenion.com
http://www.cavium.com