Circuiting the network needs

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: Growth pangs literally forced electronic design and automation major Cadence to reboot its IT infrastructure in India. Computing capacity demands were growing fast and the need for real time data transfer was also escalating.

Cadence has a centralised server farm compute infrastructure. It enables the company to run many regressions on its products before releasing them to customers. The products include software and hardware, methodologies, and services to design and verify advanced semiconductors, printed circuit boards and systems used in consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer peripherals. Earlier, the entire compute server infrastructure was scattered across 12 small computer rooms in three buildings in its Noida campus. The tremendous influx in traffic due to bandwidth intensive applications forced Cadence to consolidate its 12 small-size server rooms into one large datacentre. The company wanted a smooth transition from the distributed network to a single datacentre to ensure its network was available to all its developers and end users.

The US-headquartered company, which provides electronic design solutions for advanced IC and systems design, wanted a sturdy network that would seamlessly link its sales offices, design centres, and research facilities spread across the globe and also scale up to meet its ambitious expansion plans. Availability, scalability and performance were the main criteria while devising the company’s IT network requirements. Cadence wanted an infrastructure that could be upgraded with ease and kept pace with its growth.

Encouraged by its trackrecord at the datacentre located at Cadence’s corporate headquarters in San Jose, the company opted for Foundry’s BigIron RX Series of backbone Layer 2/3 switches to handle the traffic in bandwidth. BigIronRX has the highest non-blocking architecture optimised for maximum throughput and low latency for all packet sizes. “Foundry understood our requirement of high-end grid-based network IO intensive infrastructure and positioned the right products which could meet our exact requirements,” says Ashwin Rao, IT group director, Cadence India.

The BigIron RX backbone switch aggregated over 500 of their servers with ample room for growth. This helped strengthen the datacentre’s backbone. Furthermore, each switch utilised non-blocking 48-port 10/100/1000 MRJ-21 Ethernet modules. This module supported high-density configurations that safeguard Cadence against compromising on quality of service, latency and throughput. The 48-port 10/100/1000 MRJ21 module also increased the non-blocking Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) capacity to 768 ports for a single BigIron RX system and 2,304 ports in a standard 7-foot equipment rack.