Dell Force10

In the world of high-performance computing clusters and corporate DPCs the line of Force10 is responsible for switching and routing at speeds of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet. In January, 2002 released Dell 10GE the E1200 switch/router, having designated the intention to go beyond local a seteyn the level of DPCs of the large and average size and networks of corporate campuses.

"Biography" only 10 years long, but in it it is possible to count fifteen events which became the sign phenomena for the world network industry: the first 5 Tbit / about passive backplane, the first multiprocessor switch, the first rack gigabitnyykommutator for DPCs, the first modular switch with 1260 x GE ports, the first factory 10/40 GE on the basis of open standards, the first switch of a core of network 2.5 Tbit / with a size 2RU.

Among the clients using the Force10 switches there are a lot of large Internet companies, for example, of social network (Facebook, Zynga) and points of exchange of Internet traffic (the German DE-CIX and the Moscow MSK-IX). The trunk of a laboratory campus of the European nuclear center CERN functions based on the core constructed using 10 GE Force10 E-серии switches. A separate segment of consumers of solutions Force10 – clusters of high-performance computing, in particular, the supercomputer industry. According to analysts, 30% from Top40 list of supercomputers of the world use the equipment Force10. In particular, within the supercomputer program "SKIF-GRID" of the Union State of Russia and Belarus using Force10 technologies the SKIF supercomputer "MSU Chebyshev" was created. This joint development of MSU, Institute of program systems of RAS and T-Platforms company in the fall of 2009 took the second place in Tor50 list of the most powerful computers of the CIS.

In August, 2011 the developer was purchased by Dell corporation, and the corresponding product line received the name Dell Force10, and itself became Dell the leader of the world market in the advanced segment of networks 40 GE. The current market positioning of the solutions Dell Force10 received as a result of merge of technologies of Dell and Force10 can be characterized as follows: the high-performance open solutions for DPCs reaching the maximum functionality, flexibility, scalability and indicators of smooth operation of any DPCs irrespective of, they service the small working group or the largest search website of the Internet.

In focus – open solutions

Products of the Dell Force10 family represent the open solutions of high-performance switching for DPCs created on the basis of an open architecture. It means support of open standards, ability to integrate with the equipment of other producers.

All Dell Force10 switches work running one building FTOS operating system (Force Ten Operating System) supporting switching at the second and third level (Layer 2 and Layer 3) with high rates of performance and fault tolerance. In it the equipment abstraction layer which allows to start the same applications on different products of Force10 family is implemented.

By software of FTOS it is developed based on NetBSD, the best in the industry of the free OS with the open code constructed on modularity which differs in high flexibility, reliability, a portiruyemost and efficiency. FTOS is the OS of an operator class working even at the youngest model of switches of a line Dell Force10.

For management of Dell of network solutions Dell OpenManage Network Manager with the graphic user interface is used. In big installations and the virtualized environments the functionality of FTOS is complemented with excellent software of automation of transactions in DPC under the name Open Automation. The matter is that with virtualization distribution IT managers should deal with hundreds and thousands of virtual machines with appropriate resources of storage and networks. Infrastructure of DPC should adapt quickly to requirements of applications, react to them. Besides, servers, storage systems and networks more cannot be managed separately – the unified dynamic environment is necessary. Actually, Open Automation is also aimed at the solution of these tasks.