Comments from Force 10 Chief Scientist on 10 Gig Ethernet

Here is a press release on a discussion by Force 10 VP Technology and Chief Scientist Joel Goergen on the path to 10 Gig Ethernet. An interesting observation in the article is that today, service and content providers as well as Internet exchanges are already aggregating as many as eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, therefore the requirement of bandwidth for 100 Gig Ethernet is almost there.

Neterion announces 10 Gig Ethernet Adapter for SGI servers

Neterion announced in a press release that it had developed the SGI 10-Gbit Ethernet Network Adapter tuned to the particular requirements of the family of SGI Altix and SGI Altix XE server, cluster and storage platforms. The press release is available here.

A city council is Australia voices its goal towards 10 Gig ethernet

An interesting article on Zdnet Australia available here about the Toowoomba Council in Australia voicing upgrade of its network to 10 Gbps.

Article on Wide Area Ethernet

A nice article discussing the prospects of metro and carrier ethernet, particularly the requirements from carriers may be found here.

Advanced services for the broadband access market

The growth of the broadband access market (that technologies such as 1/10 Gig Ethernet PON) cater to strong depends on the demand and popularity of advanced Internet services. The most popular and discussed service is TV/Video on Demand.

I am a huge fan of the on-Demand technology. My cable provider Comcast now provides select movies which can be ordered on demand. Some of them are free, but the free ones are usually the old classical movies. I guess Comcast would like to have every movie in its repository, but alas, the cable doesnt have enough bandwidth to meet the on demand request from every customer. So they hope that given the limited collection, only a small subset of its user base will request on-demand at a given time, by which they can afford to deliver this service over the limited bandwidth available.

More than video, I would like to have sports matches on demand. Tennis is my favorite sport. The US Open Series is on. However, ESPN telecasts only the one of the semi-finals and the finals live. However, all matches are recorded by television cameras. Wouldn't it be fun to have access to all matches live, so that I can watch whichever player I am a fan of, wherever he/she is playing.

So how about Video on demand technology. Ethernet PON technology is mature, although not yet vastly deployed. Video technology is mature. So the question is when can the two be integrated to make a commercially viable venture.

And we are not far away from this technology revolution. Today, Cisco bought Video-on-Demand server venfor Arroyo for $92 million. Last month, Motorola bought Arroyo's comeptitor for $186 million. The big players now see juice in this market. Which is great, because now the millions of dollars required for an intensive marketing effort to promote the technology and make it available to the masses so that it can be cheap and commerically viable is available.

And that is a huge developement for EPON chip vendors. For device technology matures very fast. But it takes services and software to catch up. Device vendors have to hinge their bets on this factor. So Cisco and Motorola taking keen interest in the video server market ought to be great news for Teknovus, PMC-Sierra, Immenstar and the others.

OIDA Workshop on 100 Gig Etehrnet

The OptoElectronics Industrial Development Association (OIDA) is holding a one day meeting to understand 100 Gig Ethernet and provide a forum for the systems vendors, router vendors and component companies to address this. Details are available here. The Ethernet Alliance today announced that it will have representation at this workshop.

IEEE 802.3 Interim session

The IEEE 802.3 has posted its next interim meeting to be at Knoxville, TN from September 18-21 2006. The agenda of the meeting may be found here.

FTTx market growing strongly

LightReading today has an excellent report mentioning remarkable growth in the FTTx market as carriers expand on optical access deployments to accomodate IPTV and triple play. The number of fiber based access network subscriptions is expected to grow to $125 million, the report says. FTTH shippents have risen by 245% in the past year, the majority being from Japan.

This should be sweet news for the Ethernet PON vendors: Teknovus, PMC-Sierra, Immenstar , and the others.

10 Gig Ethernet Switch Revenues Soar according to report

A recently published report from Dell'Oro Group, (press release available here), reveals sales of close to $300 million in the second quarter of 2006. Cisco leads followed by Force10, Foundry and then Nortel.

Upscale 10 Gig Ethernet switch from Fujitsu

Apparently Fujitsu is rolling out a high-end version of its 10-Gbit/second Ethernet switch with features that aim to enable lower-cost, easier-to-build backplane-based computers and telecom systems. The company claims the 20-port switch is among the first to implement the 10-Gbit/s Ethernet serial interface for direct connection to low-cost optical modules.

Related news article is available here.

Neterion optimizes its 10 Gig Ethernet adapter for Sun Fire Systems

Neterion announced the availability of its new low-profile 10 GbE card, optimized for Sun Fire platforms. With a low-profile, super-fast PCI-X bus interface, the Xframe II SF is specifically designed for the new Sun Fire systems, combining support of Solaris 10, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat and SUSE Linux in one package.

In August 2004, Sun Microsystems and Neterion agreed to partnet on the development of high-speed interconnect solution for Sun platforms.

Ciena enhance Etehrnet Internetworking on DN7000

Ciena today announced enhancements to the pseudowire emulation and advanced Ethernet interworking capabilities on its DN 7000 Series FlexSelect Multiservice Edge Switching and Aggregation Platform. In the words of Dave Parls, Ciena's senior product manager

There is a lot of frame relay, ATM and traditional TDM private lines out there. They are evolving to higher capacity services based on Ethernet and other packet technologies like IP. The enhancements allow support for legacy and interworking with Ethernet.

More details are available here.

Nice read on Carrier Ethernet

A nice articke describing some of the challanges that Carrier Ethernet faces is available here. A chief issue cited is interoperatability concerns. Particularly, thd development of end-to-end Ethernet is extremely importanat towards this goal.

Fujitsu releases 20 port 10 Gig Switch

Fujitsu has released MB8AA3020, its 20-port 10GbE switch chip delivering 400+Gbps, non-blocking, aggregate switching bandwidth through 3Mbytes of multi-stream shared buffer memory.
An on-chip micro-engine drives the management interface. The IC also supports the CX4 interface and adaptive equalisation with on-chip SerDes. Fujitsu's switch chip embeds 20 high-bandwidth, full-duplex 10Gbps ports in a single, integrated 1,156-pin FCBGA package.

Ethernet over Copper article

Nice article on LightReading, which analysis the Ethernet over Copper Midband service being provided by BellSouth, and how other RBOCs are planning to come in terms with it.

AMCC to acquire Quake

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Quake Technologies. Quake is a privately-held fabless semiconductor company that is the leading vendor of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) PHY technology. Quake was recently in the news for its technology to reduce the cost of 10 Gig.