Marvell tunes EX enterprise switch for IPv6

Colorado Springs, Colo. - Marvell Semiconductor Inc. has expanded its enterprise-aggregation switch lineup with a series that supports Internet Protocol version 6 and such advanced security features as the use of policy control lists to replace access control lists. The PresteraEX116, 126 and 136 are pin-compatible with the company's 115 and 125 Ethernet switch processors.

Marvell offers a range of switching ICs that operate at Layers 2 and 3 of the OSI protocol stack. The EX family targets multicast routing and enterprise aggregation. Product-marketing manager Shalabh Khothari said that the primary impetus for moving to IPv6 was the need to support a greater variety of cell phones, PDAs and gaming devices.

The new full switch-routing devices support IP-in-IP tunneling for migration from IPv4. Line-rate IPv6 unicast and multicast routing are supported.

The design integrates a ternary CAM to support a superset of access control lists (ACLs) called policy control lists. PCLs allow network managers to build a set of well-defined keys, based on packet attributes of the user's choosing. In most cases, the result is a reduction in table size.

PCL is compatible with ACL but allows additional quality-of-service parameters to be defined. Designers can use Marvell switches with external CAMs or SRAMs for routing tables, but the internal CAM block minimizes discrete-CAM size.

Marvell also offers sFlow, which is an on-chip traffic-monitoring and intrusion-detection system defined by Inmon Corp. and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

The EX116 and EX126 are sampling now. The EX116 offers 48 Fast Ethernet ports and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. It interfaces with any standard 10/100 physical-layer device. The EX126 offers 12 ports of Gigabit Ethernet and is meant to be used with Alaska, Marvell's Gigabit Ethernet physical-layer device.

The higher-integration EX-136 is slated for 2005.