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Extreme Networks launches BlackDiamond 20808

Viewing the Ethernet market potential crossing $35 billion by 2010, with at least 10% CAGR, Extreme Networks recently presented a solution for metro Ethernet transport for enterprises and service providers around the globe, launching its BlackDiamond 20808 switch.

Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director, Product Management, Extreme Networks, said, “Since, the volume of data and users is growing explosively; it becomes quite difficult for an average organization or service provider to manage the IT budget and streamline the ARPU. Consequently, staying at the top of the growth without breaking the bank is a challenge affecting companies of every size and in every industry.”

With bandwidth demand curve rising quite steeply with time, the revenue curve is not seen proportionate to the former, Munshi added, “The gap between the bandwidth demand and revenue is increasing and to fill this gap we need to reduce CAPEX and OPEX and increase the ARPU.”

Dubbing the new product as best suited to the needs of Metro Ethernet Transport, Munshi elaborated on product’s scalability, performance and value. He proposed that the BlackDiamond 20808 has an unmatched capacity with 120 Gbps per slot bandwidth, 64 10GE ports per chassis and 192 10GE ports per pack.

Informing about the possible future upgrades, Munshi said, the fabric upgrade can scale from 2 Tbps to 8 Tbps, since the fabric design allows for massive scalability with backward compatibility. The increased capacity enables service providers to offer advanced services and grow ARPU.

In terms of performance, the product enables 250K queues per application with high quality of service, fine grain multicast control with multicast QoS, multicast scale for video services with 128K multi cast streams and capability of supporting 1 million MAC address/routes in hardware.

“In terms of value,” Munshi added, “when compared to other competitors like Juniper, Alcatel and Cisco, Extreme 20808 slashes CAPEX with 10GE port pricing at $6,000 per port. It is done through optimizing Silicon for Ethernet, supported by the dense chip geometry.”

Acknowledging the fact that every $1 on power requires another $2 on cooling, Munshi justified Extreme20808 on green IT parameters and said, “The Extreme Networks switches consume less power. On the purchase of 4 chassis we offer the 5th one as free.”

He further described the green IT qualities of the product and said that it reduces hazardous waste, global warming, carbon footprints, energy consumption and cost of operations.