The 40Gbps QSFP+ transceiver is well suited for Infiniband

Both switches are 1RU in height with 32 line rate 40-Gbps Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP+) ports for the Nexus 3132Q and 48 line rate 10 Gbps SFP+ with 6 fixed QSFP+ ports for the Nexus 3172PQ.All of the QSFP+ ports on the device can operate as a native 40-Gbps port or a four independent 10-Gbps ports. The switches also have a serial console port, USB port, PPS connector and an out-of-band 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet management ports. From a software perspective, the rich NX-OS operating system fully supports the Cisco Open Network Environment framework with Openflow and the onePK toolkit in addition to standards based Layer 2 and Layer 3 features.Silicon photonics is not a new idea; there have been many attempts at commercial photonics devices back in the 90’s. However, despite some considerable R&D investments, commercial products have been few and far between, and to our knowledge, integration of silicon photonics with advanced IC technology on a die has never been launched commercially. Until now. An integrated IC with active photonics has finally made it into a commercial product with a Luxterra device found in a Molex Active Optical Cable (AOC).In November 2011, Molex purchased Luxtera’s AOC business, including the quad small form factor pluggable (QSFP+) 40 Gbps Ethernet and InfiniBand products.