Recently I stumbled upon the blog of David Gee in the UK. He covered the Cavium acquisition of Xpliant as well as Broadcom’s announcement of the StrataXGS Tomahawk chipset less than two months later. The remarkable thing about both chipsets is that they are both capable of 3.2 Tbps and feature programmability, something which the Trident II (a 1.28 Tbps chipset) didn’t have. The Trident II is used on Cisco’s Nexus 9000, Juniper’s QFX5100, and HP’s 5930, to name a few switches. There had been great anticipation for the Trident II because it contains support for VXLAN, which the Trident did not. However, the most recent tunnel encapsulation protocol, Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE), isn’t supported on Trident II. Well, with Tomahawk, as well as Xpliant, because of their programmable nature, they should, in theory.

Broadcom’s press announcement page contains an impressive array of quotes from vendors such as Brocade, Big Switch, Cumulus, HP, Juniper, Pica8, and VMware, to name a few. It remains to be seen what vendors will implement Xpliant.