NTT Communications Global Super Link Service

NTT Communications Corporation announced that it will expand the service area for Global Super Link a virtual private network service supporting Ethernet to England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong in addition to the U.S. and Japan.

NTT had demonstrated the performance of its service in this years Superbowl when it relayed high definition content to Japan at 70 Mbps. NTT aims to use MPLS technology and its Global IP backbone to offer secure virtual private Ethernet service with world-class network management. Enterprise users can create a global LAN environment using their existing equipment.

Read more news in this article.

Cisco integrating Ethernet with Infiniband for HiPC

Cisco today announced that it is expanding its portfolio of solutions that support high performance computing by delivering a common framework which will integrate Ethernet and InfiniBand, end-to-end management software, and a new InfiniBand switching platform and operating system software. The solution will integrate the Cisco SFS 7000D Series InfiniBand DDR switches with the above features, to simplify the deployment of clusters.

It is interesting to observe these two technologies which were developed parallely and competed with each other, now being supported together by multiple vendors.

Scintera raises $12 million Series C funding

Scintera develops electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) technology for 10 Gigabit Ethernet signal processing, thus positioning itself well with the 802.3aq standard due later this year. The new 10-Gigabit Ethernet PHY is designed to enable the development of serial transceivers that will support 10-Gbit/sec transmission over 220 m of legacy multimode fiber.

This post marks the 100th post at http://ethnews.blogspot.com On this occasiion, I would like to thank all the readers and contributers for a successful endeavour.

Narad releases Ethernet switch for 100 Mbps access over cable networks

Narad Networks, a provider of Ethernet switches for broadband access solutions, today unveiled a new modular switch product line capable of delivering 100 Mbps service simultaneously to each and every home on a cable operator's network. The new modular Ethernet switch can be deployed in a variety of configurations for various commercial and residential requirements. Narad claims that its solution has electronics costs loosely the equivalent of Passive Optical Network (PON), but has far less fiber deployment cost.

EPON a key enabler for IPTV

An excellent article highlighting the expected growth in Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and EPON technology is available at:

http://www.viodi.com/newsletter/060600/article1.htm

Market projections indicate that the customer base of fiber to the home connections will increase to 86 million by 2010, with the bulk of growth coming from the Asia-Pacific. For example, Japan is expected to have 30 million connections alone. NTT is currently deploying 100,000 new FTTH connections per month.

Chelsio raises $12 Million

Chelsio announced that it had raised $12 million Series D Venture Capital funding. Chelsio also announced that it had LSI Logic as an investor. The president and CEO of Chelsio Kianoosh Naghshineh mentioned that this funding with help Chelsio build its next generation Ethernet protocol offload engine, which will integrate NIC, TOE, iSCSI and RDMA functionality.

This round of funding should come as a huge relief to Chelsio, which has been struggling with increasing sales of its 10 Gig Ethernet and iSCSI technology. The big question is how much will the 10 Gig adapter market take off, given that current application is limited to cluster computing. One key area of growth may be in Storage Area Networks (SANs). SANs cuurently are limited to iSCSI technology which is limited to 1 Gig channels.

Press release is available at:
http://www.chelsio.com/newsevents/pr/pr_061906.php

10 GigE campus network in Japan!!!

Force10 Networks today announced that the University of Electro-Communications (UEC), Japan's national science and technology school, is upgrading its campus network to 10 Gigabit Ethernet as part of its e-Campus Initiative as well as to support other research and computing needs across the campus.

"With our e-learning initiative well underway, we expect that traffic on the network will grow quickly over the next couple of years, and we needed an infrastructure that could support that growth," said Masayuki Takada, assistant professor at UEC.

University campus having 10 Gig backbone. Thats astounding. The Japanese have a huge research budget, and I have heard that every Japanese undergraduate is given a laptop when he enters college, and another one after two years into his program. Comments from anyone?

10 GigE Cable to reduce crosstalk

Network cabling firm Brand-Rex has announced 10GPlus, an improved design for 10 Gigabit Ethernet cables to reduce alien crosstalk (AXT). AXT occurs due to electrical interference between cables, a problem exacerbated by the higher frequencies used to achieve 10Gbpss network transfer rates.

Article on Metro Ethernet

A nice article discussing the development in Metro Ethernet is here. The article discusses products in this space by Cisco, Nortel and Juniper. Nice read.

Nortel's Ethernet Plans

In a press release today, Nortel discussed its Ethernet plans for metro networks, including its efforts for standardization of its Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) technology. A first-to-market version of PBT is already available in the Nortel Metro Ethernet Routing Switch (MERS) 8600, with development also underway to integrate the technology into the Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 and other Ethernet-ready platforms. A detailed report is available here.

Juniper's Ethernet Cards

Lightreading reports that Juniper is bringing out Ethernet cards formally dubbed the IQ2 Ethernet Services Aggregation Physical Interface Cards (PICs) for its M- and T-series routers. This seems to be Juniper's first move into Layer 2, to match Alcatel, which already has its Series 7450 Ethernet Switching box. The complete LightReading article is available here.