Cavium Networks (News - Alert) has announced collaboration with Caswell, a provider of communication appliances, to deliver multi-motherboard blade servers (MMBS) powered by an array of OCTEON processors for energy efficient cloud computing applications.

The company investigated a wide variety of processor architectures and technologies to meet the demands of data center and service provider customers for implementing their visions of cloud computing, said Polo Huang, vice president at Caswell.

“Cavium Networks not only demonstrated a clear track record of providing performance/watt but also were pioneering next generation functionalities and features for the Data Center Market,” Huang said.

Using up to 10 systems in a server rack, the high computing throughout is delivered. Company officials said that each system consists of a 4U enclosure, which integrates blade switches for the fabric interconnection, memory and required storage interfaces for Cloud Computing and Storage applications.

Cloud computing services mandate on-demand accesses to high amount of computing and storage resources, and they are being implemented by IT infrastructure at “unprecedented” levels, and data centers are scaling up to 20 times the number of servers relative to existing infrastructure.

Company officials said that this increase places an excessive burden on the energy requirements, and therefore compute density per watt has become the de-facto metric for the data center.

Additionally, systems need to be developed with terabit scalability, predictable low-latency and non-blocking throughout. Caswell’s MMBS systems addresses all of the stringent requirements as it integrates over 1000 high-performance OCTEON Plus cores in a single 40U rack. In addition, it also provides a configurable system based on the computing and storage needs of customers and applications.

The OCTEON processor family features multi-core MIPS64 based processors ranging from 1 to 32 cores on a single chip with integrated networking interfaces with hardware acceleration for packet processing, quality of service, TCP, Security, compression/decompression and deep packet inspection (DPI). Cavium’s custom implementation OCTEON core has been optimized for networking and services with very low power consumption.

The company is working with Caswell to bring massive amounts of energy efficient computing for cloud infrastructure market, said Y.J. Kim, general manager for Infrastructure Processor (News - Alert) Group at Cavium Networks.

Kim said that Caswell’s scalable system architecture along with Cavium's OCTEON processors provide the best in class solution for Data Center Operators and Service Providers as they seamlessly and incrementally upgrade their infrastructure for new cloud services and subscribers.

Cavium Networks is a provider of integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home.

Recently, ZyXEL selected the company’s OCTEON Plus and OCTEON II processor technology for a broad range of Integrated Service Gateway (News - Alert) (ISG), and next generation firewalls and UTM appliances (USG).

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Summit, collocated with TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. The Cloud Communications Summit will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. To register, click here.