Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, launched the newest and most powerful member of its innovative CloudEngine (CE) series of switches, the CE12816, at Interop 2013. The CE12816 provides the largest switching capacity in the industry at 64 Tbps, and extends Huawei’s leadership in the high-performance data centre switching market.
Leveraging Huawei’s next-generation VRP8 software platform, the CE12816 provides stable, reliable, secure, and high-performance L2/L3 switching capabilities to help customers build scalable, virtualised and converged data centre architectures. Its advanced hardware architecture is designed to have the highest performance of any currently available core switch. Like all the switches in the Cloud Engine 12800 family, the CE12816 provides support for 1, 10, 40 and 100 GE connectivity. Densities supported on the CE12816 include up to 192*100GE, 384*40GE, or 1536*10GE line-speed ports, ensuring that the CloudEngine supports multi-generational network investment.
“The launch of the CloudEngine 12816 is the culmination of our vision to offer enterprises with an affordable and powerful data centre solution that addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by cloud computing and ICT convergence,” said Ian Foo, director of Data Centre Products and Solutions. “The announcement underscores Huawei’s commitment to lead the industry with innovative solutions that combine high performance with energy saving technologies to greatly reduce total cost of ownership for our customers.”
CloudEngine Series: Scalable, Virtualised and Energy Efficient
Based on more than 10 years of accumulated research and development, as well as continued investment in industry standards, Huawei developed the CloudEngine series to handle challenges faced by data centre networks in the cloud computing era. The CloudEngine series switches provide stable, reliable, secure and high-performance services by incorporating innovations in functionality and design. Feature highlights include:
- Highly scalable, the CloudEngine series provides high bandwidth of up to 2Tbps per slot today, and is expandable in the future with upgradeable fabrics and linecards to a total system switching capacity of up to 64 Tbps. Designed to accommodate data centre lifecycle targets of up to 10 years, industry leading performance and future-proof upgradeability supports evolution from GE/10GE servers to 40GE/100GE servers, helping customers protect their investment.
- Enhancing device management and network reliability, the CloudEngine series incorporates the Cluster Switch System (CSS) feature to virtualise multiple switches into one logical switch, as well as the Virtual System (VS) feature to virtualise one switch into multiple independent logical devices. Together, the innovative use of CSS and VS turns the network into a resource pool, allowing network resources to be allocated on demand.
- The CloudEngine series also supports virtual machines by allowing network administrators to build large-scale Layer 2 networks with over 500 nodes based on TRILL, allowing for fast migration and flexible service deployment. Combined with the usage of the nCenter, network management system, the CloudEngine series is able to achieve over 10 times the virtual parallel processing capability of the industry average.
- The CloudEngine series incorporates the industry’s most efficient digital power modules, providing power efficiency of 96 percent. The system measures power consumption in real time and sets one or more power modules in sleep mode when system power demands are low. In addition, the switch uses patented front-to-rear ventilation channel design that isolates cold air channels from hot air channels.