Broadcom Corporation announced the introduction of the 25/50G scalable Ethernet controller product line

     Broadcom announced a new line of 10G/25G/40G/50G scalable Ethernet controllers. The BCM57300 NetXtreme® C Series provides the industry's lowest power consumption and smallest package 25/50G solution for the cloud data center market. With the launch of this family of products, Broadcom further strengthens its end-to-end product portfolio and reaffirms its ongoing commitment to meeting the current and future needs of cloud-scale data centers. For more news information, please visit the Broadcom press room.

     With nearly half of cloud service providers' servers virtualized and the number of virtual machines per server expected to double to 96 by 2017, the new generation of Ethernet controllers must accelerate to meet the demands of higher streaming speeds brought about by virtualization. Broadcom's NetXtreme C Series controllers deliver 50G throughput in both directions, with 30Mpps performance and the increased stream processing power required by data centers to support higher virtual machine densities. Integrating TruFlow's stream processing technology doubles network throughput and improves application performance by up to 50% compared to software-only solutions.

     Combined with StrataXGS Tomahawk Ethernet switches, NetXtreme C Series controllers form an industry-leading 25/50G end-to-end solution for the data center. The solution provides connectivity capabilities that comply with the 25/50G Ethernet Industry Alliance Standard and the IEEE Draft Standard that Broadcom helped create. The BCM57300 delivers fast, hardware-based blockage notification responses up to 5,000 times faster than traditional software-based solutions. In combination with the StrataXGS switch, the data center can avoid network congestion in advance, enabling determinate workload control across the network.

     Rajiv Ramaswami, executive vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Infrastructure and Networking division, said: "The NetXtreme C Series raises the bar for Ethernet controllers and reduces the cost of migrating from 10G to 25G. Bringing the 25/50G Ethernet specification - defined and co-developed by Broadcom and now the industry standard - to the server side will strengthen Broadcom's end-to-end solution portfolio."

     Liu Tao, senior system architect at Baidu, said, "Our cloud data centers are thriving. High flexibility in configuration and superior network performance are critical factors for both physical and virtual cloud services. We see the 25G network connection of the server as an excellent upgrade cycle. In addition, to manage the increasing number of servers in the data center, it is critical that the new generation of controllers also figure out the mechanisms to do so."

     Jyeh Gan, director of product management and strategy for Dell's Data Center Solutions business unit, said: "Our data center customers are aware of the increasing demand for traffic, and they need efficient and cost-effective solutions to meet this demand. 25G/50G Ethernet, support for advanced virtual technologies, and standards-based is a big leap forward for data centers facing the challenges of managing rapid growth. We are very pleased to see Broadcom's superior 25G/50G Ethernet solution supporting open networking."

     Corey Bell, CEO of the Open Compute Project Foundation, said: "Broadcom's NetXtreme C Series mezzanine adapter has been well received by the Open Compute Project open source community. The unmatched 25/50G combination of high throughput and low power consumption, as well as the open standard form factor, will contribute to the rapid adoption of 25G and 50G solutions in the cloud data center."

     Hatem Naguib, vice president of Network and security at VMware, said: "Combining the Broadcom NetXtreme C Series Ethernet controller with the VMware NSX network virtualization platform provides an optimized network infrastructure for the expansion of modern software-defined data centers. With support for Geneve and VXLAN encapsulation and offloading, NetXtreme C Series controllers further improve the efficiency and security of data center overlapping networks. In addition, with high-speed packet processing per second, customers will benefit from the flexibility and performance of a DPDK software gateway at the edge of the network."

     Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, said: "Based on initial large-scale cloud deployments, we expect 25G/50G adapters and controllers to be rolled out at a significantly higher rate than 40G. In addition, due to the broader market prospects of this technology, we expect that within four years of initial delivery to the market, 25G/50G will continue to gain market share, creating the second largest market performance after 10G. "Broadcom's end-to-end solution that combines NetXtreme C Series controllers and StrataXGS Tomahawk series data center switches is bound to gain rapid adoption as it helps data center operators cost-effectively scale their networks to meet growing traffic demands."