Sunday, November 26, 2006

The big effort for 100 Gig Ethernet

Ever since the IEEE formally announced its commitment to a standard for 100 Gig Ethernet in its previous plenary at Dallas, there has been a remarkable news and discussion forum coverage on this topic. That is great marketing for 100 Gig Ethernet.

So what will be the key for this technology. I believe that the price/performance ratio is the key. It is interesting that 100 GigE does not mean 100 Gbps on one wavelength (or line). For now all it means is 100 Gbps available on an end-to-end Ethernet connection. This could be in combination of 10 channels of 10 Gbps. Optical fiber systems have supported such bandwidths for years, a typical fiber can carry 160 DWDM wavelengths at OC-192 (10 Gbps). But this is confined to backbone networks where hundreds of connections have been multiplexed. The challenge is in delivering this bandwidth to an adapter.

And even if this bandwidth is delivered, will the edge device (end system) the adapter is connected to be able to make use of such high bandwidths. This has already been a major hurdle for 10 Gig adapters.

So it will be interesting to see how this technology develops and matures.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Chelsio Unified Wire Technology

Chelsio has released an excellent whitepaper describing the Terminator 3(T3) architecture used in the latest version of Chelsio's 10 Gig Ethernet adapters.

In a press release today, they have advocated the idea of Unified Wire Technology, tp replace disparate fabric technologies such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand with 10 Gig Ethernet. Chelsio also released three new product lines based on the Terminator technology.

Chelsio's products are on demonstration at the Chelsio booth at Supercomputing 2006, Tampa Bay, Florida.

Monday, November 13, 2006

100 Gig Ethernet demonstration at Supercomputing 2006

100 Gig Ethernet is on demonstration at the Supercomputing Conference 2006 at Tampa, Florida. A 100 GbE signal is transmitted from Tampa, Florida to Houston, Texas, and back again, over ten 10 Gb/s channels using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100 GbE across multiple links through the Level 3 network. This is the first time a 100 GbE signal has been successfully transmitted through a live production network. The 100 GbE system will be on display from November 14th to the 16th at the Infinera booth (Booth no. 1157).

Cisco to buy Greenfield Networks

Cisco is buying Greenfield Networks in an attempt to boost its metro ethernet product line. Greenfield develops switches with advanced Ethernet packet processing capabilities to deliver enhanced services over Ethernet in a metro ethernet network. Greenfield is one of the hot startups in this area, having Huawei-3Com and Fujitsu as customers.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Voltaire switch to add 10 Gig E ports

Voltaire's 96-port and 288-port Grid Director switches which are used for networking using Infiniband will also support ports for 10 Gig Ethernet. This is very interesting as it shows that traditional manufacturers of high speed networking technologies are gradually accepting 10 Gig Ethernet technology.