Chelsio intergrates SCSI, RDMA, TCP offload in Terminator 3 ASIC

Chelsio has released its Terminator 3 ASIC which combines NIC, iSCSI Target and Initiator, industry standard iWARP RDMA, and TOE functionalities with integrated dual 1 GbpE / 10 GbpE ports and both native PCI-Express and PCI-X 2.0 / 1.0 (266 / 133 MHz) host bus interfaces. Product specs are available here.

Chelsio claims that the T3 can deliver 10 Gbps at less than 5% CPU utilization owing to offload technology.

NetApp adds 10 Gig Ethernet support

NetApp will be adding 10 Gig Ethernet support to its higher end storage systems line. Detailed news available here. This shows the increasing penetration and acceptance of 10 Gig technology in the storage world.

Bell Labs Paper on 100 Gig Ethernet over 2000 km

An European Conference on Optical Communictaions (ECOC) paper titled "2,000-km WDM Transmission of 10 x 107-Gbit/s RZ-DQPSK" was presented by Bell Labs on Tuesday. LightReading has an interesting analysis of it here.

OAM in Career Ethernet

Related to the previous post, LightReading has another related article on how different carrier ethernet vendors are supporting OAM. Must Read...

Cisco's Ethernet Demarcation Box

LightReading has an interesting article today about Cisco releasing its first Ethernet demarcation box. A demarcation box includes Ethernet OAM to help carriers isolate faults in the network and determine if the problem is on the carrier or customer side of a connection. The demarcation box is intended to sit at the customer premises, or very close. This is an important step towards end-to-end Ethernet, because it helps carriers/service providers segment different portions of the network, and monitor them independently.

TI Demonstrates 26-Watt Power over Ethernet Controller

Texas Instruments will demonstrate a 26-watt power over Ethernet controller at the ASIS Conference in San Diego, that will allow Ethernet-powered devices, such as IP surveillance cameras, WiMAX access points and conference IP phones, to use twice as much power from a standard Ethernet cable, without the need of an AC line. To quote the press release-

TI said its 8-pin, TPS2376-H controller contains all of the features needed to develop an IEEE 802.3af-compliant powered device with safety features including a programmable, 600-mA current limit with thermal shutdown, auto-retry and fault protection.

Overview of IEEE Interim Meeting

The IEEE 802.3 interim meeting was held at Knoxville, TN from September 18-21 2006. The High Speed Ethernet (100 Gbps) study group met for the first time. Presentations made at the study group meeting are available here. The newly constituted task force for 10 Gig Ethernet PON (IEEE 802.av) also met for the first time. Presentations made at this task force meeting are available here. The summary of the meeting is available here. The main directions in which this task group will concentrate its efforts are on having higher split ratios (e.g.,64 or 128), wavelength assignment for different channels, and power budget issues.

NetXen and Force10 to jointly market 10 GigE for data centres.

NexGen and Force10 networks today annpunced an initiative to jointly market and support programs for data center managers to promote 10Gig Ethernet as the unifying technology in high-performance, flexible and scalable data centers. The featured 10Gig Ethernet-enabled products are the NetXen 10GbE NICs for blade, rack and tower servers and the Force10 Networks S2410 data center switch that provides 24 line-rate 10GbE ports.

It seems the idea here is to demonstrate that 10GbE technology is now at a breakthrough price point for widespread adoption in data centers and storage area applications.

Matisse deploying Metro Ethernet with Optical Burst Switching

Today's Lightreading report discusses Matisse Networks gearing up for higher bandwidth Metro Ethernet. Matisse is a must-watch startup as it attempts to use "Optical Burst-Switching" technology which is widely research and understood but has not been commercially exploited and deployed.

Metro networks act as a bridge between backbone Internet networks (long-haul) and the access networks (such as DSL, Cable). As bandwidths in access increase and business enterprise traffic, the bandwidth in metro networks is expected to rapidly scale up.

With increased bandwidths, the cost of maintaining dedicated circuits using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed (DWDM) technology is not scalable. Reconfigurable Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) were built so that circuits can be reconfigured based on traffic demand. Matisse improves this furthur by using Optical Burst Switching (OBS) Technology. In OBS a train of packets known as a burst may be routed along a path on demand. This means no circuits need be pre-provisioned, and expensive circuit transponders need not be dedicated for every single communication path. This frees up expensive capital, simplifies network design, and enables the creation of the pure packet metro aggregation networks where bandwidth shifts in real-time to where it is needed in the network.

Matisse may have a bright future. Its founders have prior experience in establishing Amber Networks and selling it to Nokia for $421 million in 2001.

One Year at Next Gen Ethernet News

Our first blog appeared on September 13, 2005. Since then the blog count now stands at 138, and our readership has improved enormously. Please comment on added topics you would like us to cover and other changes you would like to see on this website.

Neterion signs up OEM Sam Boo in Korea

Sam Boo, a distribution agent in Korea, will help Neterion intergrate its 10 GigE adapters in server and storage OEMs, developing distribution channels and creating a customer support network.

This I believe is the first foray of Neterion in the Asia Pacific.

French Operator Illiad to spend 1 Billion Euros for Active Ethernet Deployment

French operator Iliad will deploy an "active Ethernet" strategy, where each household has a dedicated fiber connection, in its planned €1 billion (US$1.27 billion) fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) rollout. The news article on LightReading may be found here.
Iliad plans to hook up 4 million buildings and serve up to 10 million customers with its fiber rollout, starting in Paris in early 2007 and then spreading to other major French cities. It will also make the network available via the "open access" network model in which the FTTH network is made available to service providers on a competitive basis.

This seems to be a big win for Active Ethernet technology in Europe. Active Ethernet has been already deployed in a smaller scale in Amsterdam. North America and Korea+Japan are inclining towards Passive Optical Network (PON) technology for FTTH.

Juniper adds Ethernet Cars to E320 Edge router

Juniper announced a series of enhancements to its E320 Broadband Services Router designed to improve the router's IPTV capabilities. This includes adding 192 Gigabit Ethernet connections or 12 10-Gbit/s Ethernet links, managing up to 128,000 sessions in total. The E320 is deployed in more than 28 networks spanning four continents, including some of the world's largest IPTV and multiplay networks, Juniper says.

With these upgrades, the E320 can handle more traffic than Cisco 10000 series and the Redback SmartEdge 800, which handle 61,500 and 48,000 subscribers, according to the respective vendors. Juniper also claims it's got better Ethernet density than either of those.

The LightReading article is available here.

Teknovus pushing hard in China

Teknovus, a vendor for EPON chipesets, today announced in a press release that their chips are being used by Chinese carriers in more than 20 cities and provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. According to Dr. Rex Naden, the CEO, a major selling factor for Teknovus in China has been its focus on delivering advanced services over EPON such as triple play services while meeting SLAs, managment of multiple traffic flows, and fulfilling strict Quality-of-Service requirements of Chinese carriers.

I am sure that China is a difficult but huge market to penetrate for EPON vendors, given that residential access traffic has been growing extremely fast in China. China has not yet adopted the IEEE 802.3ah standard. Moreover, companies which have an engineering base in China such as Immenstar, are likely to have a significant advantage for capturing the Chinese market with the advantage of having focusses local relationships.

The press release is available here.

LightReading article on 100 Gig Ethernet seminar

LightReading has an article today on the 100 Gig Ethernet seminar organized by OIDA yesterday at San Jose. It discusses the thoughts of senior personnel of Infinera, Picolight, Force10, etc.