Why Asterfusion® CX-T Switches？

• Advanced service functions for cloud data center networks

  Asterfusion® CX-T switches can support advanced networking functions such as DCB, ECN, RoCE, DCTCP, DCQCN, and multi-path resilient hash needed in building converged Ethernet networks with low latency, near-zero packet loss, and line-rate performance packet forwarding, achieving triple convergence of Compute, Storage, and Network service functions in modern cloud data centers.

• Accurate and comprehensive real-time network telemetry data

  Asterfusion® CX-T switches can provide accurate and comprehensive real-time INT and vINT (virtual INT – INT for Virtual Overlay Networks) telemetry data. Through detailed analysis of the INT/vINT data, cloud data center network can now carry out auto-operation, auto-repairment, real-time QoS optimization, etc. Furthermore, INT/vINT data analysis on mission-critical business applications would create even higher impacts on the bottom line, thus helping customers to build-up efficient, resilient, and profitable cloud data center intelligent network operations.

• Open control software & on-demand DevOps CI/CD

  The control plane software of Asterfusion® CX-T switches, AsterNOS, is based on open source SONiC software platform. It can support standard container architecture and Redis in-memory database mechanism, allowing on-demand DevOps CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployments) all within standard Linux development environment; Through the REST API invoked by the cloud data center management platform, AsterNOS would also allow cloud data center administrators to take full advantages of all the build-in network capabilities within the Asterfusion® CX-T switches.

• ZTP & ONIE suport for significant OAM workload reduction

  With ZTP, Asterfusion® CX-T switches can retrieve configuration files from local or file servers and then load the configurations into the switches automatically. With ONIE, Asterfusion® CX-T switches can automatically install, upgrade and manage different versions of network operating software. This combination of ZTP and ONIE would allow data center administrators to cut down the OAM workload and hence significantly reduce the overall network operation cost.

• Highly-integrated switch architecture for network convergence

  The hardware platform of Asterfusion® CX-T switches follows the open transparent principles set by the OCP (Open Compute Project). Besides the P4 programmable switching chip, Asterfusion® CX-T switch also integrates an x86-based control plane unit, two ARM SoC-based intelligent service processing units and 2*25Gbps dedicated INT front-panel ports all within a 1U space. With this fully flexible and highly integrated switching architecture, network control plane, stateless forwarding plane, stateful functional plane, and telemetry visibility plane can all converge into an unified system and hence offers cloud data center developers the innovation platform to create their own high-value applications such as deep service processing and application offloading.

Value Propositions

Application Scenarios

Highly agile & highly resilient small-medium sized data centers

Scenario 1

In the scenarios where data centers need to have a highly agile and highly resilient infrastructure for rapid evolving business models and applications, Asterfusion® CX-T switches can support protocol-independent switching functions such as flexible adjustment of FDB space, new or proprietary protocols parsing, multi-path resilient-hash packet forwarding, and fine-grained congestion control. Coupled with Asterfusion control plane software (AsterNOS) and intelligent fabric controller (AFC), Asterfusion® CX3-T and CX5-T cloud switches with 100G interconnection capability can be used to build up 2-tier spine-leaf mesh networks with superb horizontal scalability and multi-service bearing capability.

Highly-interconnected & highly-optimized large-scale cloud data center networks

Scenario 2

The combination of industry-leading 100G-port density of Asterfusion® CX564P-T as the Spine switches and non-oversubscribing Asterfusion® CX312P-48Y-T as the TOR switches coupled with CX532P-T as the Leaf switches would allow customers to build up 3-tier mesh data center mesh networks that can support up to 65,536 servers. In addition, all the Asterfusion® CX3-T and CX5-T switches come with 2*25G dedicated telemetry ports in their front panels, which would allow cloud data center administrators to collect as much INT information they need to optimize their business operations as possible.

Edge gateway for cloud data center interconnections

Scenario 3

The integrated ARM SoC-based intelligent service processing units inside the Asterfusion® CX3-T switches can carry out high-valued network service functions such as SSL decryption/encryption, service functioning chaining, stateful flow load-balancing and network address translation. Therefore, Asterfusion® CX3-T switches can be positioned and deployed as edge gateway devices to provide secured interconnections and layer-2 network interoperability between core and regional data centers in mega-sized enterprises and state own entities.