Sun to license 10 Gig technology to Marvell

In a very interesting development, Sun Microsystems today announced that Marvell will be licensing Sun's 10 Gig Ethernet technology to build its own 10 Gig Ethernet cards. More importantly, this technology collaboration is expected to continue to further generations of Ethernet such as 100 Gig Ethernet.

This is a big win for Sun whose multi threaded networking technology employs multiple DMA channels to use multi-core processors that will dominate in the future. This also illustrates how Sun is trying to promote its technology to self-exist rather than limit it to its own products as has happened in the past. Sun's 10 Gig cards were a late entry to the market compared to Chelsio and Neterion's cards.

A detailed press release is available here.

Brocade to use 10 Gig Ethernet

Brocade, one of the powerhouses in Storage Area Network (SAN) switches today announced that it will integrate 10 Gig Ethernet and iSCSI connectivity to its SAN switches. This is in addition to the existing fiber channel technology Brcade uses now.

Press Releases from Teknovus

Teknovus has had three press releases last week in conjunction with the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) conference at Anaheim. Teknovus will be using OE Solutions transceivers in its Turbo ONU EPON products. Teknovus will also be teaming up with Cavium Networks and will be using Cavium's OCTEON MIPS64 processor to build a high-performance home gateway to support triple play services. Teknovus also announced that Furukawa will be marketing a Small Form-factor Pluggable(SFP) ONU using its TK3713 chip.

Any reader who visited Teknovus's booth at OFC, it will be great to have your comments on their demos.

AT&T favoring Ethernet over Copper for the last mile

In an interesting post on LightReading today, AT&T is said to be favoring Etehrnet over copper using VDSL technologies for last mile solutions. While VDSL integrated with EPON has been discussed before, the idea of having Ethernet over DSL is interesting. The article also mentions the absence of startups in this area, with only one startup Aktino having related technology. It is also interesting to observe this thought when PON deployments in the US are moving towards the GFP-PON world. Here is the link to the article.

Nortel releases new Ethernet switches

Nortel today released the ERS 2500 and ERS 4500 switches targeted towards corporates moving to VoIP and unified communications applications over the Ethernet. These switches also come with support for Power over Ethernet (PoE).

Ciena aiming for converged Ethernet networks

End-to-end Ethernet is big now, and Ciena is the latest to market solutions for end-to-end Ethernet. Yesterday, Ciena inroduced the CN 5060 Multiservice Carrier Ethernet Platform, which it says is currently in trials with service providers. The CN 5060 delivers E-Line and E-LAN services, advanced Ethernet interworking for Layer 2 services, MPLS functionality, and support for TDM-over-packet (TDMoP) capabilities to enable service providers to deliver any service over a performance-grade Carrier Ethernet network.

Immenstar acquired by Cortina

Immenstar, the EPON chipset vendor founded in 2004 was acquired yesterday by Cortina Systmes. The terms of the deal are undisclosed. The press release mentions that Cortina aims to achieve an end-to-end solution, and the Immenstar EPON solutions fit into its plans for the access world.

Immenstar getting acquired is not a big surprise for me, because the company always looked like one of those which will deliver some hot stuff, and then make a quick exit. It operated on stealth mode for quite a while, and emerged suddenly in 2004 with EPON solutions.

So now the bug question is: What are the plans of Teknovus? It is probably the only startup left with an established product and customer line, and therefore must be a big acquisition target for any company aiming to enter this space. And an acquisition probably about to happen soon, because it doesnt seem that the EPON market is growing fast enough for the investors at Teknovus to withstand all the competitive pressures from large companies.

Sun's 10 Gig Adapter

The official specs of the Sun 10 Gig Ethernet Adapter are available here. Its interesting to see Sun price the Ethernet card and transceiver separately. This card doesn't mention the multi-threaded CPU support, so probably there will be further versions of this adapter that support this feature.

Sun introduces multi-threaded network adapter

In an interesting and remarkable development, Sun unveiled its multi-threaded 10 Gig Ethernet technologies. The idea is to employ multiple DMA channels (as many as 40) in parallel to ensure simultaneous data transfer to be handled by multiple processors in a multi-core architecture. Sun mentioned that this solution yields data transfer 4 times faster than using existing Ethernet Adapters (which I believe refers to Neterion's technology, since thats what Sun has been mainly supporting)

This demonstrates how serious 10 Gig Ethernet is going to be, particularly for end-to-end data transfer to high-end servers. Although Sun may not have an immediate market, I believe that its serious adoption of 10 Gig technology will help it emerge as a leader in this pace.

The 10 GigE effort discussed earlier with the codename 'Neptune' in this forum is expected to be part of every major Sun technology including the Niagara 2 and Rock servers expected to be released later this year.

Centillium's Mustang ONU Chipset

Centillium recently released its EPON ONU Mustang 200 ONU System on Chip (SOC). This ONU may be operated with Centillium's Colt OLT, or any other 802.3ah compliant OLT. The produce specifications are available here. In brief, the Mustang can support 8 classes of service and 256 multicast addresses.

Robert Metcalfe to be inducted in Hall of Fame

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, is one of the 18 inventors to be inducate d into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the United States. Other people chosen this year include the inventor of MRI. Congratulations!!!

Meriton with Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET)

LightReading has an interesting article here on Meriton's plans for a new technology called Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET). The idea is to switch Gigabit Ethernet tunnels directly on the WDM layer instead of doing it a layer 3. The article talks about end-to-end Ethernet delivered via backbone networks and the Ethernet PON. If anyone has some more insights into this technology please post a comment on this forum.