In the golden autumn of Beijing, the clear sky is filled with especially pleasant atmosphere that implies blossoming in spring and bearing fruit in autumn. The hard work in spring finally results in a harvest season. On September 27, the press conference for the launch of generation II high-density 10G switch by Ruijie Networks (formerly known as Shida Networks) was held at the Beijing Century Golden Resources Hotel.

Ruijie means to respond after examining the situation. Ruijie Networks, a leading network equipment and solution supplier in Chinese market, is the first vendor in China that releases RG-6800 series, a generation II high-density 10GE switch, completely by its own R&D forces when the gigabit applications become mature and 10GE trend emerges. The release of RG-6800 presents an important chance for Chinese network equipment suppliers to break through the high-end technologies in the face-to-face competition with international giants in these years.

Planning 10G product for first-mover advantages

The development of 10GE technologies began in 1999 and entered into a new age in June 2002, when the 802.3AE10GE standards were issued, which gave rise to excitement in the network industry. One year later, the enthusiasm about the new standards cooled down. Is 10GE just a cutting-edge technology or the inevitable trend after gigabit Ethernet? According to Liu Zhongdong, general manager of Product Sector of Ruijie Networks, the 10GE market is starting and the silence means the accumulation of strength. A company's task is not to guess when the market boosts, but how to make sufficient technical preparations and accumulate application experiences to promote a new generation 10GE switch that meets customer requirements before the several-fold increase of market capacity. One year after the 10GE standards are released, Ruijie Networks launches the first generation II high-density 10GE switch in the industry, which is a quick innovation based on accurate understanding of 10GE application trend, reflecting the company's core idea of "Subtly observe the application trend and rapidly meet customers' demand".

After sub-dividing users' potential needs, Ruijie Networks thinks that the future of 10GE applications is bright. The fast increasing market needs is promoting the 10GE from technology to application. The market future of 10GE is bright in terms of both gigabit Ethernet technology and application extension and the network consolidation and development requirements.

On one hand, the 10GE application is the natural extension of gigabit applications, as well as the smooth migration of Ethernet technologies.

As more and more servers use gigabit Ethernet as the uplink technology, the backbone bandwidth in the data centers or group networks increase accordingly. The gigabit or combined platforms are incapable of the needs, and the 10GE network becomes a practical requirements. The faster 10GE network inspires everyone in front of the actual environments of WAN converged by a huge number of 100M LANs, remote data backup of large-scale financial institutions, and the operation of enterprise core networks.

Technically, as the natural extension from gigabit technologies, the 10GE technology has many factors that may cause big industry changes. The 10GE is fully compatible with the current network and inherits all the existing Ethernet technologies. More importantly, the revolutionary technology eliminates the increasing bandwidth bottleneck, offers many new functions, and greatly improves the QoS. It can better meet the network security, service quality, and link protection requirements. Undoubtedly the 10GE technology is the best smooth extension of Ethernet applications and will be widely used at the convergence layer and backbone layer.

On the other hand, with the further development of network applications, the WAN/MAN and LAN consolidation is becoming the trend and application breakthroughs will be made in their respective fields. The 10GE technology offers an approach that can improve the network speed, operable distance and connectivity, and its application is surely to add forces to the development and consolidation of the telecom network, computer network, and cable television network.

About the 10GE market needs and response strategies, Liu Zhongdong said, "The future of 10GE applications is undoubted. At the market accumulation stage, however, it is important for suppliers, especially Chinese network equipment vendors, to strengthen analysis and research on user applications and technical innovations, and to speed up the R&D of mature 10GE products. The first launch of generation II high-density 10GE switch in China is a big breakthrough of Ruijie Networks' technologies in these years and also a preparation of 10GE applications." In Liu's opinion, the position of first movers in the industry is more important than actual products in the present 10GE market. In other words, the companies must keep up the technical trends and build their advantages. The launch of RG-6800 is an important preparation for the total implementation of high-end market strategies.

Setting up technical benchmark for generation II 10GE switch technologies

To respond to the age of 10GE applications, many vendors have developed various 10GE switches. These switches in the current market fall into two categories. One is the so-called first-generation 10GE switch, which uses an additional 10G module to support 10GE, but its entire software and hardware structures aim to meet the gigabit or 100M switching. Due to the design limitations, the first-generation switch is not really capable of the 10G forwarding. The other is the generation II 10GE switch, whose total software and hardware have the truly 10G switching capability and its performance is greatly improved. The generation II 10G switch is an intelligent secure device that completely complies with the 10GE standards and can really process 10G data by distributed architecture and system design and the latest backplane and line card technologies (line card bandwidth over 20G). The RG-6800 series are classical generation II switches developed based on many years' technical accumulation and advanced design.

Integrating the newest Ethernet technologies and providing powerful data processing capabilities and security measures, the generation II switch has the following basic features.

Firstly, the backplane usually adopts the CROSSBAR design that supports concurrent data transfer at the ports. The CROSSBAR structure supports concurrent data interaction among multiple ports, thus offering higher efficiency than the serial data processing of the previous two-generation switches. The virtual output queue (VOD) technology prevents the block of queue header and ensures the non-blocking data switching among line cards. Therefore, this structure is capable of line speed processing requirements of multi-module switches. Besides, the switching capacity can be expanded by replacing the management or user module, thus providing long-term investment protection.

Secondly, the link card bandwidth is 20G at least. To raise efficiency, the 10GE discards the CSMA/CD protocols used in traditional Ethernet networks, but adopts only the full duplex mode for data transfer. The bandwidth between line cards and backplane must be at least 20G to meet the line speed transfer of 10G ports. This is also the biggest difference between the first and second generations of 10GE switches. Designed for gigabit or 100M data transfer, the first-generation 10GE switch provides only 8G or 16G (mostly 8G) bandwidth between line cards and backplane. Therefore, its 10G module has not the real performance of 10G line speed. The connection between line cards and backplane of generation II switches gives up the traditional low-speed