Marvell Offers Multiservice Fabric

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Marvell(R) (NASDAQ: MRVL), a technology leader in the development of extreme broadband communications and storage solutions, today introduced a complete Prestera(TM)-FX multi-service fabric solution targeted at enterprise core switches and metro edge routers. This two-chip architecture, the Prestera-FX930 fabric access processor and the Prestera-FX9130 fabric element, provides increased scalability for the enterprise backbone to support Gigabit desktop switches, and supports multiple service types to implement comprehensive Service Level Agreement schemes. With these enhanced capabilities, system vendors and network service providers, for the first time, are able to develop advanced service platforms with increased user connections as well as bandwidth, extending their product life cycle.

With network capacity and SLA requirements constantly evolving, the network operator typically finds that the network must be overhauled by buying entirely new equipment. The Marvell Prestera-FX multi-service fabric solution allows for the development of truly scalable systems with increased port count and rate to extend the life cycle of the product, thus decreasing network ownership costs. The Prestera-FX multi-service fabric chipset scales in the number of ports it supports, enabling switching systems to expand up to thousands of ports especially with the deployment to Gigabit to the Desktop, without affecting the initial system investment. In addition, the Prestera multi-service fabric solution also provides seamlessly connecting ports of increasing rates--from Gigabit (G) and 10G ports, to 40G and 100G Ethernet ports, without changes to the backplane, chassis design or fabric architecture.

In addition to its tremendous scalability, the Marvell Prestera-FX multi-service fabric chipset provides a complete traffic management and high availability solution. The Prestera-FX multi-service fabric chipset implements per-flow queuing schemes, where hundreds of thousands of flows are policed, queued and scheduled separately, enabling broad SLA support. This approach utilizes the system bandwidth more effectively, does not require redundant components in the case of link failures and provides manufacturers with the flexibility to use different redundancy schemes for various levels of reliability.

"Existing solutions that use legacy architecture switch fabrics force equipment vendors to rebuild their platforms every three years to support high-port density solution to enable Gigabit to the Desktop, handle high bandwidth ports, or manage increasingly sophisticated SLAs," stated Paul Valentine, Marvell's Senior Product Manager for Prestera Enterprise Switches. "The new Marvell Prestera-FX chipset brings the most scalable architecture to market today, allowing system vendors to develop future-proofed systems that truly scale from 10 Gigabits per second up to 2.5 Terabits per second, while adding new service schemes when needed. Thus, these unique capabilities will extend the product life cycle."

Marvell Technology Group Ltd.