IEEE HSSG approves PAR and 5 criteria

Quick update, from the archives of the IEEE HSSG public reflector, the PAR and 5 Criteria has been approved by the HSSG. The objectives now include supporting 40 Gig Ethernet over a distance of of 100m, and support 100 Gig Ethernet over a distance of 40km on single-mode fiber. Support will also be provided for OTN.

This is a big win for 40 Gig E proponents, whose support was considerably weak until January this year. It will be interesting to see how the working group handles the tricky issue of dealing with 40 Gig and 100 Gig physical layer challenges simultaneously.

Presentation for IEEE HSSG meet

Presentations for the IEEE HSSG meet next week have been uploaded at the IEEE HSSG website. Some of the presentations I found interesting are from Dell and Deutsche Telekom about the use of 40/100 Gig Ethernet from their points of view.

Standardization of 40 Gig vs 100 Gig Ethernet

Next week at the IEEE 802.3 plenary in SanFrancisco, the High Speed Study Group (HSSG) will meet to gather consensus on a 100 Gbps Ethernet standardization activity. There has been considerable support within the HSSG committee for an interim 40 Gig Ethernet standard, or a standard which is interoperable between 40 Gig and 100 Gig. There have been several news reports covering this battle since the last plenary meet in Geneva in May 2007, unfortinately I have not found time to research this and write about it in the past month in this blog. Here are some interesting articles that I found on a Google search:

Controversy threatens 100G standards work

Group pushes 100 Gigabit Ethernet

To those unfamiliar with the process of standardization, the Study Group has to develop sufficient consensus to have a Project Authorization Request (PAR) and resposes to 5 Criteria which cover (i) Broad Market Potential (ii) Compatibility with existing standards (iii) Distinct Identity (iv) Technical Feasibility and (v) Economic Feasibility. I believe the 5 Criteria of the HSSG has already been decided. Once the Study Group develops consensus, the IEEE forms a standardization committee which develops the standard (also known as the task force). If the HSSG is unable to gather a consensus, then the IEEE may scrap the creation of the standard or create a new Study group with new deadlines. The HSSG has already taken 2 extensions to submitting the PAR.

While I will keep you posted about developments in next week's plenary, please do post your comments on this issue. I am of the opinion that wif a technology is sufficiently mature, it ought to be standardized irrespective of what volumes and market it may drive. Also the standard must taken into account driving a low price point for the technology so that volumes grow up. As an example, although the 10 Gig Ethernet standard is about a couple of years old, 10 Gig NIC volumes are still verry low. One of the reasons I see here is that the standard mandates support for a distance over 300 mts which drives the cost of the PHY devices very high, and thus prevents lowering the entry price point of this technology. Hope the same doesn't happen to the HSSG standard.

Infonetics Research Group PON and FTTH report

Apologies for not having any blog updates for about a month, it has been a pretty dry June, and I was vacationing for a bit. Am now recharged :), ready to blog for another year. By the way, this September will mark the two year anniversary of this blog.

The Infonetics Research PON and FTTH Equipment and Subscribers" report released last week was very encouraging. Worldwide PON sales are up to $336 million in the first quarter of 2007, while Ethernet FTTH (including EPON) sales are up to $81 million.

Some other good news are:
- Korea is on track to add 700,000 to 800,000 EPON subscribers by the end of 2007.
- EPON subscribers make up 64% of worldwide subscribers, BPON 33%, GPON 3% in 2006. However, this market share will change very soon as Verizon deploys GPON in 2007. The report also quotes Verizon already having 500,000 FiOS customers.

TThe report also predicts high growth for FTTH technologies as service providers aim to deliver more and more bandwidth to the end-user to provide enhanced quality video-on-demand, peer-to-peer networking, online gaming and other high bandiwdth services.

Multiport Gigabit Ethernet adapters from Chelsio

A product release that escaped my notice: Chelsio released it multi port Gigabit Ethernet adapters last week, its first venture into the lucrative gigabit ethernet market. Chelsio now has the two-port S302E and S302X adapaters and the Quad port S304E adapters. Chelsio mentions in its press release that it will target the storage network and the servers market and will target the replacement of infiniband and fiber-channel technologies with Ethernet.

This is an interesting and ambitious ploy, given the dominance of fiber channel in storage networks. I am not convinced that Gigabit Ethernet is a good technology for these markets in the long run, Chelsio's venture seems to be more to have some product base in this market. Moreover the cards are priced high at $795 and $1495 for the two-port and quad ports respectively. They come with Chelsio's standard TCP/IP offload and RDMA offload technologies, which again I am not convinced is required for Gigabit Ethernet.

I am also quite dissapointed at the lack of ingenuity by Chelsio, two-port and quad-port Ethernet adapters are already available from Sun Microsystems (Sun's product line in this area is available here). Using the same chipset technology but replacing a 10 Gig port by a few 1 Gigs certainly doesn't seem novel enough. Market timing seems to be poor since competitors like Sun already have a much cheaper version of these cards.

Hitron-Sumitomo team to provide EPON products to Chunghwa Telecom

Taiwan based Hitron and Japan based Sumitomo electric will jointly supply Chungwa Telecom of Taiwan with EPON OLT and ONU products. The deal is expected to total NT$130 million (US$3.9 million). Impressive budget for EPON deployment in Taiwan.

Broadband releases technology to increase range of ethernet

Lightreading reported that Broadcom today announced its eight-port octal physical layer (PHY) device that extends the reach of Ethernet over twisted pair cables. The new 65 nanometer CMOS octal PHY, featuring Broadcom BroadR-Reach will provide added flexibility to standard Ethernet cables by enabling 10/100 Ethernet to operate up to 500 meters on one, two or four wire pairs of Category 5 (CAT 5) or telephony grade cabling, and 1 Gig Ethernet to a distance of 100 metres. This technology will be demonstrated at Interop 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mellanox releases 10 Gig Ethernet Card

Yet another manufacturer of Infiniband technologies is now targeting the 10 Gig Ethernet adapter space. Mellanox today announced its 10 Gig Ethernet adapter. It features are not very different from others in the market: it supports multi-core chips, and mentions that it attempts to target the virtualization space. Mellanox also mentioned today that it has shipped over 2 million Infiniband ports. It is interesting to find many infiniband manufacturers releasing ethernet adapters.

Broadcom releases its 10 Gig cards

Broadcom today released its own 10 Gig Ethernet NIC, supporting Microsoft's Windows TCP chimney engine, iSCSI block storage and remote direct memory access (RDMA) on-chip. It is interesting to see so many players in the 10 Gig Ethernet NIC market now, while the size of the market is still small and uncertain. I will try to come up with a comparison of major 10 Gig Ethernet NIc cards and their features in the next post.

Intransa launches 10 Gig E SAN

Intransa today announced the launch of 10 Gig Ethernet based StorStac Storage System PCU100 SAN. Neterion's 10 Gig adapters will be used by Intransa. Something very relevant to my research work and past discussions in this forum:

Douglas F. Gibbs, PhD, pathology bioinformatics manager at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who tested an Intransa StorStac System 10GbE PCU100 configuration during the beta trials mentioned, “Many of our initial test scenarios revealed that factors other than the Intransa system were rate-limiting in the tests. It will take some catch-up on the part of OS, software and hardware vendors to take full advantage of the 10 GbE speed,” Its great to see more recognition in CPU and OS bottlenecks to deliver the I/O required from 10 Gig E networks.

Teknovus's chipsets to used as benchmark by China Telecom

According to a Teknovus press release, FiberHome's FTTH solution using Teknovus' EPON chipsets will be used as a benchmark by China Telecom to evaluate other EPON systems and solutions. FiberHome already has deployments in several provinces in China, Teknovus' aggressive strategy in China seems to be paying off, and more widespread EPON deployments could help drive huge volumes for Teknovus' EPON silicon.

Nice research paper regarding performance issues in networking

An excellent paper by Wenji Wu, Matt Crawford and Mark Bowden of Fermi Labs, DOE, titled "The Performance Analysis of Linux Networking – Packet Receiving" is available here.

The authors trace the delivery of a packet from the Network Interface Card to the Application Layer consuming the packet, in the Linux protocol stack. They discuss the operating systems subtelities involved in this entire process and demonstrate the challanges in delivering high network throughput to the application layer. Experimental results discuss the impact of changing some parameters such as the number of packet descriptors to improve network performance. Must read for those interested in high-speed network performance issues.