April Fools Pranks

Here is a story from Lightreading about Google going nuclear.

And here is a video of a prank played on Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Well done.




Enjoy.

The question of net neutrality

Three days ago, Comcast announced that it is reversing its policy of blocking peer to peer (P2P) traffic selectively during peek hours of traffic. Although Comcast had never announced this as a stated policy, numerous studies in last year or two had showed P2P performing substantially poor over Comcast compared to competing ISPs. So the question of Internet neutrality has become an immensely debated subject over the last year. Many ISPs are actively lobbing Congress against Internet neutrality, while there is at least one prominent group, SaveTheInternet.com for net neutrality.

The reason I take up this for discussion in this forum is that it is actively tied to the idea of open access, which has been discussed here in past, see here and here for more details.

While I don't agree with Comcast in this case since I think it illegally manipulated traffic without making its customers aware of it, I don't claim to be a proponent of net neutrality either. I think that there is a legitimate demand for Quality of Service (QoS) applications such as video and voice of the internet, and the same cannot be delivered by carriers and content providers unless there is a sound business and revenue model to deliver the same.

Currently we lack a good availability of QoS because of what an erstwhile colleague of mine correctly described as "fingerpointing". In short, Content Providers blame ISPs for not having QoS guaranteed pipes, because of which they cannot deliver enhanced QoS applications. ISPs blame users for not willing to pay for such services because of which there is no revenue model to deploy infrastructure to deliver QoS. And users blame content providers for not providing such QoS services for which they would be willing to subscribe to.

Not sure of how to get out of this, but I think there is a need to fast express lanes in the Internet for advanced services. After all, no one complains when they pay a toll to use a bridge on a highway. Similarly in many cities of the world, there are tolls to use express roads in certain hours. I am sure that a similar approach will work well in the internet.

Any thoughts, please post your comments here.

Virtualization and Networking

I wrote a detailed article at my Sun Microsystems blog on how network I/O works with virtualization. It discusses the possible solutions: binary address translations, paravirtualization, and hardware assisted virtualization. Here is the link:

http://blogs.sun.com/hotnets/

Getting more out of your network adapter

As we go to higher bit-rates, it is typically difficult to achieve lie rate out-of box performance, because of many potential points for a bottleneck. Here is an article that discusses various strategies to get higher network I/O throughput.

Neterion releases IOV compliant 10 Gig Ethernet interface

Neterion today released its X3100 Ethernet adapters supporting the recently standardized Single-Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV). Neterion released the card today at VMWorld in Cannes, France. SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG workgroup extension to PCIe that allows a single adapter to truly behave like multiple physical adapters in a virtualized server.

It appears that Neterion is placing high bets on virtualization. This seems interesting given that virtualization is likely to increase the demand for high-speed network adapters. It would be interesting to know how much overhead SR-IOV reduces compared to previous NICs of Neterion.

Multi-root I/O virtualization standard is also near. Can someone give some insite into the IOV standardization process?

Fiber Channel over 10 Gig Ethernet

Intel today released open source code for encapsulating Fiber Channel packets in Ethernet Frames which can be then transported over 10 Gig Ethernet. The software designed for linux is available on Open-FCoE.org. I expect that this will bring in more 10 Gig Ethernet stuff in SANs and data center environments where Fiber Channel has been pretty dominant till now.

Video Clip Series

In continuation with the previous post, I will be posting some interesting video clips related to the discussion topics of this forum, to illustrate the growing popularity of this media. Most of these video clips are embedded from sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Revver etc.

Today's clip features a discussion with an NTT official about why we are witnessing adoption of Ethernet PON technologies in Japan while Europe and North America are going with GPON.

The power of video clips

Slightly off-topic here... owing to my spare time in the holiday season. I am impressed at how predominant video clips are becoming over the internet... the success of You Tube being just one example. Advertising is increasingly shifting to using video clips over the internet. Look through YouTube and you will find ad clips from well recognized companies including Sony Playstation. As an example, here is Sun Microsystems' video clip advertising its 10 Gig Ethernet adapters... something on topic.



In case you are a video producer or amateur and would like to explore ways of making money over the Internet using your video/ movie clips, here is an excellent article by a well-known independent cinema veteran.

Btw, VMware released their ESX 3.5 with support for Neterion's cards with a claim of delivering 10 Gbps from a virtualized domain with near native OS CPU utilization. Anybody able to verify this?

Happy Holidays!!!

Google's 10- GigE switch

Just read an article from Nyquist Capital about Google designing its own 10 GigE switches. Its interesting how the authors traced the source of thousand of SFP+ components to Google to determine this. The article discusses how the strategy is very similar to Google designing its own servers and compute farms from basic components as opposed to buying servers from companies like IBM, HP SUN etc.. The article also mentions Google adding 5K+ 10GigE ports a month to manage its 500,000+ compute nodes.

Thats a ton of money being saved, given the cost of 10GigE switches in the market today. Which brings us to the question, what is so proprietary about a switch that vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Woven etc., can sell them at a huge price and a huge margins. Does IOS-X from Cisco have some patented stuff that open source software cannot implement or don't have. I would love to see the above Google technique revolutionize the switch market and motivate some startup to design a switch fabric based on commodity hardware.

About the optical world

A bit of shift to the optical technologies in my blog today, with LightReading's Optical Expo going on in Dallas. One interesting thing that strikes me is that today optical stocks are soaring, both Ciena (CIEN) and Infinera (INFN) have > 5% gains with no extraordinary news from either company. May be Optical Expo is delivering a strong message which is going unnoticed. Any coments?

From news reports, 100 Gig technologies are getting quite some attention, with AT&T, Verizon both complaining that the standards may not be ready fast enough. Interesting to note that they have been observing / are anticipating tremendous bandwidth flow in their pipes. There has been much talk about how much bandwidth demand video can hog. Certainly there is extraordinary promise. Netflix is already hosting video and provides download services.

I think more than anything else, it depends on how the access world picks up. Give people optical fiber to their home, give them a 1Gbps bandwidth pipe, and see how much video and bandwidth they will use. The potential is extraordinary.

So my appeal to AT&T, Verizon and the likes. Focus on access. Get all PON technologies rolling fast. Invest your money in digging those trenches to the apartments and homes and you will be extraordinarily rewarded.

By the way, this blog has had double views over the last two days. Is it just me dreaming about the success of Optical Expo?

Teknovus gets $28 million funding

Teknovus, one of the leading companies making EPON chipsets, yesterday announced $28 million funding from a group of equity firms. New investors in Teknovus include Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Galleon Crossover Fund, Vision Venture Capital from Taiwan and Technology Alliance Investment and Itochu Technology Ventures from Japan. Teknovus’ existing investors also participated in this round, including USVP, Partech, Focus, Samsung, and Mitsubishi.

Our blog turns two years

We turn two years today. For those interested, our first post is here.


It has been a great experience following trends in this very hot and growing field. Just looking back at the progress, Ethernet PON is now widely deployed with 10 Gig standardization coming up, 40/100 Gig standardization is going on, 10 Gig Ethernet adapters are close to entering the volume market, and high speed I/O is now being considered more and more important by chip and server vendors.

Thanks to all readers, all those to supported the blog sending comments and emails. Hope you continue to find this blog useful in the future.

Also we will soon come up with a new layout and a poll. Please help us understand your needs better by participating in the poll. Thanks again.