Pica8 announced this morning the first switches to offer Broadcom’s Tomahawk switching chipset.

The line, announced last fall by Broadcom just after Cavium announced the competing Xpliant series, supports a line rate of 100 Gb/s Ethernet, and more importantly supports the new 25 and 50 Gb/s speed grades being standardized for data centers.

Demand for a 100 Gb/s product is growing; with today's announcement, Pica8 thinks it can meet it.

Pica8's PicOS software has been ported to Inventec’s DCS series switch, which is based on Tomahawk and comes with 32 100-Gb/s QSFP28 ports. A high-performance and low-latency switch, Inventec's product is favorable for next-generation data centers.

Inventec is a Pica8 hardware ecosystem partner, a program that attempts to offer more choice for end users by allowing them to decide which platform to use for white box workloads. With PicaOS' support capabilities, such as Linux and OpenFlow, it is designated a compatible hardware and is available through the program as well.

Right now, there are only samples of the Inventec Tomahawk platform ready for testing. The Tomahawk chipset itself is available only in sample quantities; Broadcom hasn't publicly disclosed a timeframe for general availability.