Advantech and Silicom Ltd. announced a partnership that will enable Advantech to integrate Silicom's range of multi-port networking bypass adapters into their network appliance platforms.
Advantech will offer six Intel NIC-based PCIe Network Mezzanine Cards (NMCs) with support for 1GbE fiber or copper bypass ports and 10GbE fiber bypass ports.
According to Advantech's Peter Marek, Director x86 Solutions for Advantech’s Networks and Communications Group, time to market, re-usability of software across platforms and total cost of ownership are key factors for the success of Advantech's OEM customers. "Network Equipment Manufacturers now can seamlessly combine the benefits of our modular and field replaceable network interfaces based on NMCs and Silicom's unique and powerful bypass implementation" said Marek. "Especially, customers using Silicom NICs on other platforms can now move to Advantech's appliances without having to invest in, spend time on, or maintain software to accommodate different bypass schemes."
Silicom’s Ethernet bypass technology allows for bypass of the NMC’s Ethernet ports on a host system or software failure, loss of power, or upon software request. In bypass mode, the connections of the Ethernet network ports are disconnected from the system and switched over to the other port to create a direct connection between the two Ethernet ports in that bypass segment. In bypass mode, all packets received from one port are transmitted to other port and vice versa. This feature enables the bypass of a failed system and provides greater availability levels for the network.
Initial offerings based on Silicom technology with copper bypass include the Advantech NMC-0104 and NMC-0802 with four and eight GbE ports respectively. The NMC-0105 (SX) and NMC-0106 (LX) each provide four GbE ports configured for fiber bypass. All of the Silicom-based gigabit Ethernet products use the Intel 82580EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller.
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