Google policymaker argues about owning your own fiber

Here is an interesrting article from Google about our need to reduce the dependence on ISPs to deploy advanced fiber based broadband access services such as PONs. This coincides with Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf criticizing ISPs for not deploying PON like infrastructure in the US (See article here). Google has also bought considerable mobile spectrum recently sold in the US.

These show Google's increasing efforts to reduce its dependence on ISPs to supply services to end-users. Interesting Google's blog refers to an "open access" like model (discussed earlier in this forum), in which people own the fiber connections to their home, and ISP's bid for the right to provide services to them. The blog draws an interesting analogy to cars which were first rented by people (like cabs), but were eventually bought by masses; and computers which were first shared in a mainframe, but are now owned by everyone.

Brocade buys Foundry

Brocade announced yesterday its intent to buy Foundry networks for $3 billion, a considerable premium over Foundry's current market cap. This deal is interesting in a variety of ways, but it definitely points towards the importance of Ethernet, particularly Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in the future. And in many ways it could be the turning point of the ethernet revolution in the data center.

Technically the deal makes sense. Brocade is a champion of fiber channel. But with FCoE, it is clear that Brocade will be threatened by Ethernet based vendors taking away a slice of backend switches. With Foundry, Brocade can offer a product line complete with technologies over stages of evolution: from fiber channel, to ethernet, to FCoE. It also poses a challenge to Cisco's emergence in the data center.

While this deal sounds good, I have been always skeptical of the execution of the deal when two equal sized companies merge. It just seems difficult to bring two corporate cultures together when neither one can dominate given that the size of the two is almost equal. One prominent example which has not worked till now is the AMD - ATI tech merger, the combined company's net worth being $4 billion now compared to the $5.5 billion for which ATI Tech was initially bought. No it will be interesting to see how things move forward after the deal.

Chelsio now supported on VMWare ESX 3.5

If you missed this press release from VMWare- Chelsio's 10 GigE family is now supported on ESX 3.5.
Also, Centillium has been bought by TranSwitch.

PMC-Sierra White Paper on 10 GigE

PMC-Sierra has released a white paper on their 10 Gig reference design. While the paper does not talk about much technical details on 10 GigE, it does try to motivate 10 GigE the obvious way, IPTV. It talks about the growing demand for HDTV, and how people with multiple set top boxes would require bandwidth that can be provided by 10 GigE solutions. Nothing much new, but may be interesting read for those in this field. Paper may be downloaded from http://www.pmc-sierra.com/ftth-pon (Registration required).

Welcome to our new readers

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We have also an excellent search feature now, again courtesy google. We regularly refine and update this, and we recommend you to use this to find other posts and lively discussions on this blog.

Happy reading.

Comcast reports testing 100 GigE

Comcast today issued a press release stating that it had successfully tested 100 GigE over its backbone network between Philadelphia and McLean, VA using Cisco's 100 GigE interface for its CRS-1 platform. The release also mentions that Comcast followed the specifications for the IEEE 802.3ba standard for 100 Gig Ethernet.

While this makes Comcast one of the first service providers to test a 100 Gbps point-to-point tunnel, I would like to remind my readers that this itself is not a major technological achievement, however colorful the news may read. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has existed in backbone networks and the optical world for several years now. So has the Cisco CRS-1 which can route multiple OC-192 (equivalent of 10 Gbps in the optical world) and OC-768 (40 Gbps). In fact Cisco claims that its CRS-1 can route upto 92 Terabits of traffic. I was not aware of a 100 Gbps interface to the CRS-1 before, but I presume that Cisco has it now, at least in prototype.

So carrying 10 optical channels across a backbone network is not something new. What's new about this I presume is that the 10 optical channels are delivered over a single interface which follows the 100 GigE IEEE 802.3 ah standard. Moreover 100 GigE has to my knowledge not been demonstrated before on a WAN, although there are previous studies from Lucent and AT&T showing 100 GigE on a LAN. For those unaware, the IEEE 802.3ba draft deals with how to handle several 10 GigE channels on a Ethernet interface. I am curious about which vendor Comcast worked with for the 100 GigE end interface. Opnext and Hitachi are the two companies having EA-DFB Lasers that can support 100 GigE according to this article.

EPON supporting DOCSIS from Salira

Apologies to my readers for no updates over the last month-and-a-half, I was busy traveling. There have not been any major updates in our field, except for the news of Salira releasing DOCSIS support for its EPONs.

The idea is to use EPONs as a feeder network for Cable TV networks. DOCSIS 3.0 which has been standardized recently and is still under trial deployment by Comcast and others and support downstream bandwidth is excess of 12 Mbps. PONS seem the natural choice to act as feeder networks.

However, this idea is not new. CATV networks already use fiber as a feeder till the last mile where copper takes over. EPONs have also been suggested earlier as feeder networks to VDSL, whose reach is much shorter. So much is to be seen on how Salira plans to market this.

Article on EPON

Here is a recent article on Ethernet PON and 10 Gig EPON. The author discusses the two technologies, deployments, and market share of the two companies. Also discussed is the market demand for 10 Gig EPON technology. The author rightly points out that the utility of 10 Gig EPON depends on convergence of business and residential services, and growth in demand for HDTV over IP.

Cisco Catalyst 4900M switch

Here is an excellent article about the Cisco Catalyst 4900 M switch which was released last January.

Broadcom backing Multi-link distribution (MLD) for 40 GigE

According to this article, Nick Ilyadis, Broadcom CTO for its Ethernet Networking group mentioned that Broadcom will be supporting the multi-link distribution (MLD) proposal for 40 GigE which is expected to be the solution adopted by the IEEE high speed ($0 Gig and 100 Gig) task force. A brief overview of MLD is available from the IEEE 802.3ba public area here.

I have not been following up much on the activities of IEEE 802.3ba, could anyone from the committee or outside could comment on this?

News from Chelsio and Neterion

Lots of news coming in from Chelsio today. Chelsio announced that its 10 GigE card will be supported by Citrix XenServer which is based on the open source Xen virtualization code base. Moreover Chelsio also announced SGI and HP as its customers. HP will supply Chelsio's T3 10GbE adapter for its Integrity server line.

It also seems (according to this article) that Chelsio will be coming out targeting Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). FCoE is extremely latency sensitive, and Chelsio may have an important advantage in this space because of its hardware supported TCP stack, which may be able to provide more guaranteed latencies. (Edit: As a reader correctly pointed out, FCoE does not use the TCP stack, so my argument of Chelsio having an advantage for FCoE is incorrect. Thanks for pointing this out.)

Neterion, the other prominent 10 GigE vendor also announced that its driver will be released part of Windows Server 2008.

It seems to be time that 10 Gig Ethernet is entering a high volume market. 10 GigE adapters are being increasingly deployed in servers, and they seem to be just ready to enter the storage market. Technologies such as Virtualization and IOV will help increase the volume of 10 GigE. It will be interesting to see how these two startups (which have actually been in business for over 5 years now), evolve over the course of the next two years.

Chelsio releases TOE support for Windows Chimney

Found about this a little late... Chelsio released a TCP/IP Offload Engine (ToE) driver for Windows Chimney, Microsoft's network stack architecture which allows offload of the TCP stack to supported ToE hardware. Here is the press release.

Another nice article about adoption of ToE in the storage world is here.