Mellanox has announced the launch of its SN4000 Ethernet switches, powered by the Spectrum-3 12.8 Tbps Ethernet switch ASIC.

The devices are designed for cloud, ethernet storage fabric, and AI interconnect applications. mellanox

There are multiple form-factors available supporting combinations of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE.

The switches are designed to operate with the firm’s 200/400GbE SN3000 leaf switches to form leaf/spine network.

The devices are used for scale, tunneling, and network virtualization, enabled by the firm’s flexflow packet processing technology.

For diagnostics it also incorporates Mellanox’s WJH (what just happened) real-time telemetry.

The firm says the switches are targeted for layer-2 and layer-3 fabrics, in both virtualized and non-virtualized use cases.

It features up to 200,000 NAT entries and 1,000,000 on-chip routes. A shared packet buffer is integrated to ensure fair bandwidth sharing. The device enables multiple configurations with simultaneous NRZ and PAM4 port speeds, and supports dual stack IPV4 and IPV6 protocol operation.

Its the latest addition to a portfolio based on Ethernet cloud fabric (ECF) technology and is backward-compatible with earlier models at an SDK level. As with other switches in the Spectrum family, the device is ONIE bootable and can be used with open network operating systems including Mellanox Onyx, DENT, SONiC,and Cumulus.

“Mellanox Spectrum-3 offers better performance, more advanced features, and easier management than any other 12.8 terabit switch,” said Amit Katz, vice president of Ethernet switches at Mellanox. “Our VXLAN support features single-pass routing for more than 500,000 tunnels, making Mellanox Spectrum-3 the best switch not only for cloud data centers, but for any networking deployment supporting virtualization, containers, or microservices.”

Josh Leslie, CEO of Cumulus Networks says “Mellanox Spectrum-3 enables a feature-rich leaf/spine network architecture able to achieve massive scale, at twice the performance as was previously possible, making the combination of Cumulus Linux and Mellanox Spectrum-3 an important part of our product portfolio.”