Woven Systems this week unveiled a 10Gbps top-of-rack Ethernet switch for data centers that costs $500 per port.

The TRX 200 is a 24-port sister to Woven’s TRX 100, a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with four 10Gbps Ethernet uplinks.  The TRX 200 is a single rack unit high with 24 SFP+ 10G Ethernet ports that can also function as 1G Ethernet ports, designed for top-of-rack deployments aggregating 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers.

The TRX 200 also includes four 10/100/1000Mbps switched Ethernet ports, along with two additional Ethernet management ports and a single console port. Management options include Web browser, Telnet remote login, a command line interface (CLI) and SNMP Version 3.

It also includes field-swappable redundant AC or DC power supplies, and a field-replaceable fan tray.

Even though Woven is claiming 10G price/performance leadership, Arastra, a start-up company backed by Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim, unveiled a 48-port top-of-rack switch a year ago at $400 per port.  But Woven is aiming the TRX 200, and the rest of its fabric switching line at Cisco’s Catalyst 6500 and Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches, which Woven says are repurposed enterprise switches not optimized for data center intensive applications, oversubscribed, and priced at thousands of dollars per 10G port.

In addition to its aggressive price, the TRX 200 allows customers to choose various oversubscription levels for both Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet servers. Link aggregation on the switch supports up to six trunk groups with up to eight ports per trunk.

The TRX 200 also includes Woven’s vSCALE ASICs with Dynamic Congestion Avoidance technology. DCA is designed to decrease latency by monitoring congestion across a large fabric and steer traffic onto less congested alternate paths without dropping or re-ordering packets.

If a link or switch fails, the vSCALE processor reroutes traffic to an alternate path in less than 10 milliseconds, avoiding application time out and server reboot, Woven says.

The TRX 200 has a list price of $11,995 and is available immediately.