The 14-slot Z7 can be configured with up to 13 compute blades while the six-slot Z2 can accommodate up to five blades. Each blade provides up to 40,000 DMIPS (Dhrystone millions of instructions per second) of processing capacity, yielding a system that scales to 520,000 DMIPS, the equivalent of 520 billion non-floating point operations per second. The ZSN dynamically load balances applications across all available blades. Meanwhile, for high-speed broadband aggregation, traffic forwarding, and deep packet inspection, traffic blades are provided with either 10 x 1GE ports or 6 x 10GE ports. This provides up to 720gbps of unidirectional interface capacity on the Z7 and 240gbps on the compact Z2.
“The ZSN is the first of a new breed of service delivery routers and could be a game changer,” said Michael Howard, cofounder and principal analyst with industry research firm Infonetics Research. “While other suppliers have begun taking steps in this direction, Zeugma is starting at the next level by integrating general purpose compute resources as a key element of a high-performance edge network element. While throughput capacity will always be a requirement, compute performance may well be the most important metric for this class of network equipment.”
Zeugma also offers an operating system and a “sandbox” that employs APIs to enable service providers to introduce, manage and monitor the vendor’s, their own or third-party applications – and to protect the applications from one another, Walsh said.
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