Avaya is continuing to grow its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) virtualization architecture.
VENA was first announced back in November of 2010 and is now being expanded with the new Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 7000 switch. The VSP is a 10 GbE top-of-rack switch that supports Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB), and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networking standards.
“The VSP 7000 is a next gen top-of-rack switch targeted at the data center and rounds out the portfolio,” Jean Turgeon, global general manager of Data Solutions at Avaya told InternetNews.com. “The VSP 7000 addresses the storage or server edge connectivity for high density 10 GbE.”
The VSP 7000 is a 24 port, 10 GbE switch. Avaya has also provided a high-speed fabric interconnect that Turgeon said provides 625 Gbps capabilities across racks. Turgeon said that the VSP can provide in excess of 5 terabits per second of forwarding capacity interconnecting the top-of-rack switches. The 625 Gbps interconnect is on the back of the switch and doesn’t require a data center to use the front real estate on the switch.
“The 625 Gbps flow is something that our magic sauce enables,” Turgeon said. “It’s an in-house capability.”
Turgeon said the 5 terabits is provided by 8, VSP 7000 units delivering 625 Gbps of throughput per switch.
“The key is that we have the ability to do point-to-point simultaneous transmission,” Turgeon said. “The more top-of-rack switches a customer has, the more throughput they get.”
On the front end of the switch, Avaya has a media adapter capability that will enable the VSP 7000 to move beyond 10 GbE to 40 and 100 GbE as well as Fibre Channel interfaces.
“We’re asking customers to rack mount this switch and they should be fine for the next decade and not have to forklift it,” Turgeon said.
The VSP 7000 fills out the Avaya VSP portfolio which began with the VSP 9000. The VSP 9000 was first shown by Nortel in May of 2009. Avaya acquired the Nortel Enterprise business in September of 2009 for $900 million.
Avaya is also announcing its new Virtual Provisioning Service (VPS) as part of the VENA expansion.
“What VPS does is it will sit between VMware’s vCenter and our orchestration and management tools and provide the ability to track virtual machines,” Turgeon said. “So if an administrator moves a virtual machine, VPS will detect and track where that virtual machine goes and configure the network to adapt to those changes.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
