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Force10 Networks Growing its Share of the 10GbE Switching and Routing Market

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October 19, 2010

Force10 Networks Growing its Share of the 10GbE Switching and Routing Market

By Patrick Barnard, Group Managing Editor, TMCnet


When you think about the 10 Gigabit Ethernet network equipment market, is Cisco is the first vendor that comes to mind? Make sense -- after all it does command about 80 percent of the overall market.

But the 10GbE network equipment market is growing so quickly that certain smaller vendors with significantly less market share are also doing remarkably well. San Jose, Calif.-based Force10 Networks, which offers high density 10GbE switch/router products as well as carrier transport and access solutions for the enterprise and service provider markets, reports that it earned more than $175 million in the past 12 months – not bad for a company that has only about 2 percent of the market. This past March the company, which has offices in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, filed an initial public offering of common shares on the NYSE.


Force10’s high performance 10GbE switches have been deployed by major data center operators (companies for whom “the network is the business”) including SEGA Corp., , Yahoo! and SalesForce.com and the New York Stock Exchange; by service providers including NTT (News - Alert) Communications, Telx, and Network Redux; and by government (or quasi-government) organizations including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The company claims its 10GbE switch/routers “provide industry leading density and resiliency to deliver simpler networks at lower costs.” With its advances in hardware and software, Force10’s 10GbE switching solutions “enable greater network reliability, control and scalability from the data center to the enterprise wiring closet.”

Front and center is Force10’s flagship E-Series of 10GbE switches, including its ExaScale and TeraScale lines. The ExaScale platforms, according to the company, “are virtualized chassis-based switches that enable a new way of designing switching and routing infrastructures. ExaScale’s architecture, and patented backplane and ASIC technology are designed to increase network availability, agility and efficiency while reducing power and cooling costs. ExaScale supports mission critical applications across converged fabrics in data center, telecommunication provider, service provider, enterprise and HPCC networks.”

The ExaScale platform, coupled with the Force10 Operating System (FTOS), which is based on the UNIX NetBSD operating system, makes a “cost-effective and flexible deployment option complete with comprehensive management, automation and resource provisioning capabilities.”

The company, which merged with Turin Networks early last year, also offers a strong portfolio of carrier access and transport products, facilitating TDM to Ethernet transition, including its Traverse family of multiservice transport switches, TraverseEdge multiservice edge multiplexers and TDM edge multiplexers. As a player in the 10GbE network equipment market the company naturally has a strong focus on virtualization, data center automation and convergence – the three most powerful buzz terms in the industry today.

TMCnet recently interviewed Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing, Force10 Networks, to learn more about where the company is coming from and where it is headed.

Garrison said that the company’s current breakdown of customers is “about 80 percent data center and 20 percent service provider – and within the 80 percent that are data center, it breaks down into portals, hosting and enterprise data center.”

“We also don’t mind branding ourselves in the telco side, where people are thinking about cloud data center initiatives or TDM to Ethernet migration,” he said. “Part of our value prop is that if your network drives your business you’re likely to be keen on Force10 – we save power, cooling, and space; we save money; we’re at more advanced performance levels than the mid-tier market providers. We’re always competing against the high-end vendors at the high end.”

Garrison said the company plans to grow its service provider offerings over the next year or so, as it seeks to further capitalize on the cloud communications trend.

“We do have some products coming out over the next couple years that will help us grow the service provider side of the business,” he said. “But for now… we want to be focused on the three types of data centers. We don’t think one size fits all – we talk to portals differently than hosting and differently than enterprise data center, and that’s why we launched the Data Center Network channel on TMCnet.”

Garrison said Force10 Networks currently has more than 600 employees and more than 1,100 customers worldwide.

“And here I should say we have 1,100 happy Cisco customers – because we think we’re the best choice to migrate to a high performance environment using all your Cisco knowledge and doing that in a very easy and friendly way,” he said.

Force10 has 15 sales offices and five technical assistance centers deployed globally.

“Having five technical assistance centers is key,” Garrison said, adding that the company has three support centers in APAC, two in the US, and one in London. “That actually comes out to six but we count our two centers in Plano and San Jose as one because it’s run as one call center. So we have a follow the sun model – 24/7/365 – very high-touch, because our customers have turned out to be semi-global in nature, if not global.”

According to Garrison, about 80 percent of Force10’s business is in the US, but it’s also doing a lot of business in Europe, Russia and particularly Asia. The company also picked up a chunk of business in the Middle East through its strategic partnership with IBM (News - Alert). He says “China is where a lot of the growth is – so we do feel that China is a place where we want to push hard.”

Garrison said according to a recent Gartner (News - Alert) report, Force10 has about 2-3 percent of the data center market, and considering how vast, fast-growing and lucrative the market is, “that’s actually not a bad number.”

“In terms of 10GbE we have about 2 percent of the market, whereas Cisco is doing about 80 percent,” he said, adding that this is comparable to competitors such as Brocade (News - Alert) and HP, who are in the 2-4 percent range.

Force10 was one of a handful of companies that in the late 1990s represented the “first wave” of Ethernet switch vendors focused on 10GbE technology. “Just like Foundry Networks (which merged with Brocade in 2008) and Extreme Networks (News - Alert)… we came out of GbE switch router market in the late 90s, and said let’s do it again around 10GbE,” Garrison said. “So we built the whole company around 10GbE – and that’s what we launched on in 2002, and here we are 11 years later.”

So considering the massively high density switches it is already building, plus the fact that it’s looking to penetrate deeper into the service provider market, is Force10 looking to get into 100GbE anytime soon?

Garrison said yes in due time but the focus is on 40G now, for two reasons: First of all there’s little to no demand for 100GbE from Froce10’s current customer base, which is mostly data center operators -- plus “the pricing for 100GbE is enormous right now.”

“For carriers, it’s cheaper than SONET, so it makes sense,” he explained. “But if you’re selling to data center guys, it doesn’t make sense. We really see the split here as not by availability of technology but by price point. It’s all comparative – if you’re buying 10GbE links in your data center for $3,000 per port today on average, and you’re seeing 100 GbE pricing of $100,000 to $200,000 from the likes of Juniper and Brocade, you’re going to see that it doesn’t make sense. But with 40 GbE price points in the range of $20,000 to $30,000, it’s more expensive but [most companies] can afford that. But they can’t get their arms around the idea of paying $100,000 to $200,000 a port.”

The 40GbE does make sense near term for Force10, he said, because the demand for it is there.

“We have publicly stated that in the data center we believe that 40GbE is purpose-built and priced right for connections between the top of rack when you’re aggregating 10GbE servers,” he said. “If you move to that level of server I/O, you now need a higher speed at the top of the rack to go from the server I/O up into the core. So we’ve said that we’re going to lead with 40GbE for data center top of rack into core connection -- we’ve already alluded that we’re going to have 40GbE uplinks on our core switches -- and we’re going to have 40GbE uplinks on our 10GbE top of rack switches.”

Garrison said the company is currently debating whether it’s best to simply bolt on 40GbE uplink cards or if it might be better to build a whole new product line built around 40gbE.

Giving a quick breakdown of the company’s 10GbE switch/router product line, Garrison said Force10’s E-Series (core and aggregation), which comes in three form factors, is by far the company’s most popular platform, accounting for half of its revenue on Ethernet side (and by the way the current ExaScale line card family is actually the company’s third generation of ASIC).

To say the platform is “big” in terms of scalability is not an understatement: The ExaScale platform today supports 140 line-rate 10GbE ports and a whopping 560 4:1 oversubscribed 10GbE ports. “It routes and it switches and it has a lot of trickery built in there,” Garrison said, adding that “we’ve always led in density and reliability and helping people to understand that it’s now safe and rational to put that many ports into a chassis and expect to be able to support it.” In one configuration, Garrison said, the E-series “can be a monster end-of-row – aggregating over 1,260 servers – it can do 1,260 10GbE ports in a chassis. So people who want a very flat, simple, one-layered topology, that’s one way we can do that.”

Second level down is Force10’s C-Series, a mid-range chassis (end-of-row or mid-tier aggregation) which comes in two form factors.

“This has really been built as a catalyst killer,” Garrison said. “We have the performance of a 6509 in the form factor of a 4500 and at the price point of a 4500, and that’s really what it does all day long is just take out 6509 and 4500 business in both the channel and direct sales, for customers who like a lot of the technology that we offer but don’t want to pay for the premium of the E-series platform.”

Next is the S-Series, which is Force10’s line of stackable Ethernet switches. “So we have pizza boxes – we have GbE platforms and 10GbE platforms, and we’re doing a lot of enhancements and extensions of the S-Series platform this year to accommodate virtualization technology, automation technology and convergence technology,” Garrison said. “Everyone is expanding their product lines to accommodate that, so we’re no different.” The S-Series, he said, “is obviously is top of rack, it is storage I/O, it is application aggregation and it is compute farms.”

One of Force10’s key market differentiators is its energy efficiency – one benefit of having all those ports in a single enclosure is that it opens up opportunities for tremendous savings on power consumption:

“We have the best performing gear in terms of energy efficiency -- and this was just confirmed by the Tolly Group in a recent report,” Garrison said. “We have always been leaders in power and cooling technology, and we’ve just proven that the ExaScale platform is the most energy efficient one out there. It’s a metric of 34 watts per GbE port. And you’ll see the [Tolly] report mentions Juniper and Cisco explicitly -- it doesn’t mention Brocade because Tolly couldn’t get hold of the data sheets and Brocade was less than helpful. We think that they’re about 45 watts per 10GbE and Juniper and Cisco are both in that range or way higher.”

But it took quite a bit of engineering – and quite a bit of convincing – before Force10 came to be recognized as a leader in energy efficient data center switching.

“In the early days, we really scared people with the number of ports per chassis, we were really different – people were so used to oversubscription and scaling through devices for resiliency,” Garrison said. “If you have a network with ten boxes, the traffic is going to meander through anyway. But we would show up and say ‘you don’t need 10, how about two?’ and people would say ‘whoa, what if one of them goes down?’ So it took a while for us to convince people that they were reliable.”

According to Garrison, Force10 was showing customers in 2003 “that you can save power and space” by going with a bigger box with more ports. Back then it wasn’t called “Green,” he said, rather, the “Green” movement started around 2007. He said at first the trend made him kind of “upset because people were all putting these green leaves on their websites” yet truth-be-told networking gear “isn’t really ‘green’ at all.”

“We can help it become ‘green-er,’ and can maybe make a data center more ‘green’ – but by gosh we suck power and there’s no way to stop that, we need electrons man!” he said. Nevertheless the company has seen great success in building energy efficient products built around the theme of “eco-efficiency and we’ve stuck with that.”

During our interview we touched on a range of other topics including the company’s Open Automation Framework; IPv6 readiness (all of the company’s products offer support for IPv6); the company’s participation in numerous standards bodies; the decision to base its products on the NetBSD open source operating system; it’s key partnership agreements; its customers; and its reseller model -- all of which will be covered here on the Data Center Network channel in the weeks and months to come…


Patrick Barnard is Group Managing Editor, TMCnet, focusing mainly on call and contact center technologies. He also compiles and regularly contributes to TMCnet e-Newsletters in the areas of robotics, IT and customer interaction solutions. To read more of Patrick's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard







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