SWITCH AEC Family

The LP SWITCH Active Electrical Cable (AEC) is the industry’s first Y-Split AEC. It is designed to provide reliable connectivity between servers and the Top-of-Rack (TOR) switch. In a server rack, the TOR is the single point of failure (SPOF) responsible for downtime that sacrifices five-9’s level of service. Data centers architect around this SPOF by standing up redundant racks for failure over when needed. However, the cost and power of redundant racks makes the approach unscaleable.

The Y-split LP SWITCH AEC eliminates the redundant hardware by connecting a server or Network Interface Card (NIC) to dual TORs. Using the SONiC Dual TOR Management Container, the server can automatically failover between TORs in under a millisecond.

The LP SWITCH AECs are offered with 28G/lane link speed with NRZ signal modulation and 56G/lane link speed with PAM4 modulation for next generation NICs and are available with QSFP28 and QSFP56 connectors, inside which are Credo low power, high performance retimers.