EZchip Delivers NP-3 Network Processor Evaluation System with 24 Gigabit Ports and Two 10-Gigabit Ports

EZchip Delivers NP-3 Network Processor Evaluation System with 24 Gigabit Ports and Two 10-Gigabit Ports

EZchip announced that it is shipping its NP-3 EZappliance, a compact hardware platform based on EZchip’s NP-3 30-Gigabit network processor. EZappliance is a powerful platform that utilizes the NP-3 network processor and is provided to EZchip’s customers as a tool on which to develop and test their application-specific software and expedite the introduction of their NP-3 based systems to the market.

EZappliance is a powerful platform that utilizes the NP-3 network processor and is provided to EZchip’s customers as a tool on which to develop and test their application-specific software and expedite the introduction of their NP-3 based systems to the market.

The EZappliance can also be utilized by network equipment vendors as well as application software vendors as a hardware platform on which to deliver their software-based solutions with enhanced performance, shortened time-to-market and reduced development costs. Such solutions may include Ethernet access and metro switches and routers, traffic bandwidth control and management, security gateways and network probes for traffic monitoring and analysis.

The NP-3 EZappliance is a 1U stand-alone or rack-mountable system with 24 Gigabit Ethernet SFP ports and two 10-Gigabit XFP ports, and features full redundancy including swappable AC/DC power supplies, fan tray and filter tray. It is a complete control-plane and data-plane solution that provides fully programmable packet processing and fine-grained hierarchical traffic management.

The integrated NP-3 network processor at the core of the EZappliance enables high throughput and flexible packet processing including layer 2-4 header manipulation, tunneling, switching, IPv4 and IPv6 routing and stateful flow classification. The NP-3’s integrated traffic management provides Quality of Service, including hierarchical per-flow and per-class rate control and traffic shaping, congestion management and highly granular statistics collection.

EZappliance features both the VSC7344, a 24-port quad-speed Ethernet MAC, and the VSC8486, a 10GbE LAN/WAN transceiver from Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation (Pink Sheets: VTSS). The industry’s only 24-port Ethernet aggregator that supports both 1GbE and 10GbE aggregation in a single device, the VSC7344 greatly simplifies the hardware and software design of a system supporting both these ports. In addition, the VSC7344 enables the highest levels of oversubscription, advanced QoS, and integrated SerDes. Vitesse’s VSC8486 is a low power LAN/WAN XAUI or XGMII 10GE transceiver supporting synchronous Ethernet in variety of XFP and SFP+ applications. The EZappliance reference board provides a quick to market solution with proven interoperability between the NP-3, VSC7344, and the VSC8486.

EZappliance also features the NetLogic Microsystems NL7000 knowledge-based processor to enable high-speed decision processing for complex tasks such as Access Control Lists (ACL) for core, edge, metro and enterprise networks. The NL7000 family of knowledge-based processors offers superior parallel processing capabilities through an advanced superscalar architecture with deep pipelining and advanced power management that allows the processor to handle multiple tasks at 40 Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) line rates while maintaining the lowest power.