Transceiver provides 10Gbit/s connectivity

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Oct 31, 2003

QLogic Corp has chosen the Intel TXN17209 multimode XPAK optical transceiver to provide 10Gbit/s connectivity for the QLogic SANbox 5200, the storage industry's first Fibre Channel stackable switch.

QLogic Corp has chosen the Intel TXN17209 multimode XPAK optical transceiver to provide 10Gbit/s connectivity for the QLogic SANbox 5200, the storage industry's first Fibre Channel stackable switch, which supports storage traffic at up to 10Gbit/s.

Designed specifically for high-performance enterprise applications, the Intel TXN17209 optical transceiver uses multimode technology to deliver 10Gbit/s Ethernet and 10Gbit/s Fibre Channel transport for enterprise applications such as the QLogic SANbox 5200 at half of the cost, a third less power consumption and in one-third the size of earlier solutions.

The QLogic SANbox 5200 stackable switch is a 20-port Fibre Channel switch that features 16 ports running at 2Gbit/s and four ports running at 10Gbit/s in a slim 1U form factor.

The four 10Gbit/s ports use Intel TXN17209 optical transceivers to provide a high-speed uplink of aggregated 2Gbit/s datastreams.

"Customers for our new stackable switches need a high-speed dedicated stack interconnect to eliminate the loss of user ports for interswitch links", said Frank Berry, Vice President of Marketing for QLogic Corp.

"The Intel TXN17209 optical transceiver provides a low power, low cost 10 Gigabit solution in a space-saving XPAK form factor that enabled us to pack more capacity into the SANbox 5200".

Intel cofounded the XPAK multisource agreement (MSA) to address the needs of short-reach 10Gbit/s connectivity in cost-constrained enterprise applications.

MSAs define electrical interfaces, physical characteristics, signalling schemes and other essential characteristics that enable companies to provide system OEMs with a reliable supply of interoperable products.

The Intel TXN17209 XPAK multimode XPAK optical transceiver offers single-side mounting, less than a 4in2 footprint and only 3.5W of power consumption, enabling high port density in switches and placement on PCI network interface cards.

It is hot-pluggable and includes a digital management interface allowing for field configuration, easy setup and remote troubleshooting.

With its industry-standard XAUI 4bit parallel electrical interface, the transceiver connects directly to readily available Ethernet and Fibre Channel ICs.