Aricent Intros Data Center Ethernet Software

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Aricent®, a global innovation, technology and service company focused exclusively on communications, today announced a new release of its widely deployed Intelligent Switching Solution (ISS) specifically tailored for building Data Center Ethernet equipment. Aricent’s ISS is a licensable, pre-packaged software framework that jumpstarts the development and integration of advanced switching products, and has been selected by more than 60 networking and telecom equipment manufacturers worldwide.

The new ISS release includes functions essential to delivering Ethernet in the Data Center including Priority Flow Control (PFC), Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS), congestion notification and Data Center Bridging Extensions (DCBX). Additional features targeted for the Data Center include VRF, hot-standby for OSPF and PIM, graceful restart, IS-IS integration, and enhancements to private VLAN, ACL, MLDv2, MSDP and IPv6. These capabilities, available in a licensable pre-packaged framework, represent another industry first for Aricent. ISS’ Data Center features are compliant with multiple IEEE specifications, including 802.1Qbb, 802.1Qaz and 802.1QAu.

The rise in popularity of virtualization and cloud computing – within the enterprise and service providers - has led to a rapid increase in the performance requirements expected from Data Centers, subsequently driving a fundamental re-architecture of the Data Center network. Ethernet has emerged as the de-facto technology to unify communications in the Data Center across both the data and the storage networks. According to Infonetics Research, Data Center Ethernet represents a large and growing market, and the revenue from Data Center switches alone is expected to reach $7 billion in 2014. This represents an increase of nearly $3 billion in annual revenue over today’s base and a 10% CAGR over the next few years.

"Ethernet-based infrastructure is at the core of Data Center networks, and thus an ideal technology for consolidating data and storage networking traffic," stated Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst, Enterprise Voice and Data at Infonetics Research. "In order to meet the demands of converged networks, equipment vendors need to introduce interoperable and standards-based products that incorporate the latest Ethernet technology. Software frameworks like Aricent’s ISS help equipment vendors meet these new and complex product requirements and accelerate time-to-market.”

Aricent Inc.