The datacenter fabric market is a very hotly debated one at SNW this week, and for a good reason too. The biggest names in the $21 billion Ethernet switches industry are constantly pushing out new products and promoting existing ones – and Alcatel-Lucent is a part of this trend. Despite the company only holding a 1.2 percent share of this market, it’s unveiling a new data center switch and management application. First of all though, it’s giving out some details about 3 of the components of its Application Fluent Network (AFN) architecture: Virtual Network Profile (vNP), Pod and Mesh.

“vNP allows the switches to enforce defined application profiles to prioritize, establish quality-of-service, attach security parameters and provision appropriate bandwidth and capacity for specific applications.”

Mesh, in turn, comprises active Gigabit Ethernet and 10G Ethernet links between vNP-enabled top-of-rack switches and incorporates the MC-LAG specification to inverse multiplex traffic over Ethernet links. This along with 40/100G Ethernet switch-to-switch links, creates the AFN Enterprise Mesh which includes Pods, 10G meshes of 6900 switches with 2 microsecond latency.

Moving on to the new Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch and management software, the former is a 1RU device available in 20- or 40-port configurations with 2 expansion points. It features 1.28Tbps of memory, 960Mpps of forwarding performance, sub-microsecond latency, 128,000 MAC addresses, and 3.5 watts per 10G port. The management software is dubbed the OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager or VMM, and provides a centralized dashboard covering switches, ports, hypervisors and VMs as well as real-time historical tracking and logging.

FCoE is one of the hottest topics at the SNW Spring 2011 conference, which kicked off yesterday, and while Cisco is ramping up its offerings, the networking giant’s competitors follow. Among them is QLogic, who rolled out an update its 10GbE converged network adapters for the Cisco Data Center Fabric.