Glossaries

A

• ASIC

  A chip custom-built for one task; in a switch the forwarding ASIC moves packets in hardware at line rate.

D

• Data Center Switch

  A data center switch is a high-performance network device designed to interconnect servers, storage, and other networking equipment inside a data center at spee

O

• Open Networking

  Open networking is an approach to building network infrastructure by separating (disaggregating) hardware from software, and using open standards and open-sourc

P

• PoE Switch

  A Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch is a network access-layer device that simultaneously delivers both data and electrical power over a single Ethernet cable — e

R

• RDMA

  RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) is a networking technology that allows one computer to directly read from or write to the memory of another computer — bypass

• RoCEv2

  RDMA over routable UDP/IP Ethernet (UDP 4791) for low-latency, low-CPU transfers in AI/HPC fabrics; depends on near-lossless Ethernet (PFC/ECN).

S

• SONiC

  SONiC decouples the network operating system from switch hardware. Built on Linux with a containerized architecture, it programs switching ASICs through SAI (th

• SR-IOV

  PCIe feature that splits one physical NIC into many virtual functions, letting VMs and containers bypass the hypervisor for near-native I/O.

T

• Teralynx 10

  Marvell 51.2 Tbps programmable switch ASIC for 800G AI/ML fabrics—ultra-low latency, high radix, 200MB+ buffers.

• Teralynx 7

  Marvell 3.2–12.8 Tbps programmable switch ASIC for 100G–400G leaf/spine—~500 ns latency, large buffers, AI/HPC fabrics.

V

• VPP

  User-space framework that forwards packets in cache-friendly vectors (batches) on commodity CPUs; used to build software routers and dataplanes.

Z

• ZTP

  A switch self-configures on first boot by fetching its IP, OS image and config from network servers — no manual CLI needed.