Advantech Partners with Silicom Ltd.

By DE Editors

Advantech and Silicom Ltd. have announced a partnership that will enable Advantech to integrate Silicom’s range of multi-port networking bypass adapters into its network appliance platforms. Initially, 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.

Silicom’s Ethernet bypass technology allows for bypass of the NMC’s Ethernet ports on a host system in the event of 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. All packets received from one port are transmitted to the 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. The 10 GbE solutions use the Intel 82599ES 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. The NMC-1002 (SR) and NMC-1003 (LR) 10 GbE NMCs offer 2 x10GbE ports with Fiber Bypass.

For more information, visit Advantech and Silicom Ltd.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.