As data-center switching architectures increasingly adopt 100GbE, the SN3420 offers a high-performance, cost-effective way to evolve host connectivity from 10G to 25G. Equipped with 48 ports of 10/25GbE and 12 ports of up to 100GbE in a compact 1U form factor. The SN3420 is an ideal Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch platform, delivering a total throughput of 4.8Tb/s with a processing capacity of 3.58Bpps. The SN3420 enables the seamless use of QSFP28 connections for leaf-spine topology and future-proofing the data center.
Network disaggregation: open Ethernet
Open Ethernet breaks the paradigm of traditional switch systems, eliminating vendor lock-in. Instead of forcing network operators to use the specific software that is provided by the switch vendor, Open Ethernet offers the flexibility to use a choice of operating systems on top of Ethernet switches, thereby re-gaining control of the network, and optimizing utilization, efficiency, and overall return on investment. Open Ethernet adopts the same principles as standard open solutions for servers and storage and applies them to the world of networking infrastructure.
Performance without compromise
Packet buffer architecture has a major impact on overall switch performance. The Mellanox Spectrum-2 packet buffer is fully shared across all ports, supporting cut-through line rate traffic from all ports, without compromising scale or features. With its fast packet buffer, Mellanox Spectrum-2 is able to provide a high-performance fair and bottleneck-free data path for mission-critical applications.
Pervasive visibility for simplified operations
Mellanox Spectrum-2 provides deep and contextual network visibility, which enables network operators to proactively manage issues and reduce mean time to recovery/innocence. Mellanox Spectrum's What Just Happened (WJH) feature leverages the underlying silicon and software capability to provide granular and event-triggered information about infrastructure issues. In addition, the rich telemetry information from Mellanox Spectrum-2 is readily available via open APIs.
Features without compromise
For modern data center infrastructure to be software defined and agile, both its compute and network building blocks need to be agile. Mellanox Spectrum-2 features a unique feature-rich and efficient packet processing pipeline that offers rich Data Center Network virtualization features without compromising on performance or scale.
Scale without compromise
The number of endpoints in the data center is increasing exponentially. With the current shift from virtual machine-based architectures to container-based architectures, the high-scale forwarding tables required by modern data centers and mega-clouds increase. To answer these needs for scalability and flexibility, Mellanox Spectrum-2 uses intelligent algorithms and efficient resource sharing and supports unprecedented forwarding table, counters, and policy scale.
