Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Ciena aiming for converged Ethernet networks

End-to-end Ethernet is big now, and Ciena is the latest to market solutions for end-to-end Ethernet. Yesterday, Ciena inroduced the CN 5060 Multiservice Carrier Ethernet Platform, which it says is currently in trials with service providers. The CN 5060 delivers E-Line and E-LAN services, advanced Ethernet interworking for Layer 2 services, MPLS functionality, and support for TDM-over-packet (TDMoP) capabilities to enable service providers to deliver any service over a performance-grade Carrier Ethernet network.

Immenstar acquired by Cortina

Immenstar, the EPON chipset vendor founded in 2004 was acquired yesterday by Cortina Systmes. The terms of the deal are undisclosed. The press release mentions that Cortina aims to achieve an end-to-end solution, and the Immenstar EPON solutions fit into its plans for the access world.

Immenstar getting acquired is not a big surprise for me, because the company always looked like one of those which will deliver some hot stuff, and then make a quick exit. It operated on stealth mode for quite a while, and emerged suddenly in 2004 with EPON solutions.

So now the bug question is: What are the plans of Teknovus? It is probably the only startup left with an established product and customer line, and therefore must be a big acquisition target for any company aiming to enter this space. And an acquisition probably about to happen soon, because it doesnt seem that the EPON market is growing fast enough for the investors at Teknovus to withstand all the competitive pressures from large companies.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Sun's 10 Gig Adapter

The official specs of the Sun 10 Gig Ethernet Adapter are available here. Its interesting to see Sun price the Ethernet card and transceiver separately. This card doesn't mention the multi-threaded CPU support, so probably there will be further versions of this adapter that support this feature.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Sun introduces multi-threaded network adapter

In an interesting and remarkable development, Sun unveiled its multi-threaded 10 Gig Ethernet technologies. The idea is to employ multiple DMA channels (as many as 40) in parallel to ensure simultaneous data transfer to be handled by multiple processors in a multi-core architecture. Sun mentioned that this solution yields data transfer 4 times faster than using existing Ethernet Adapters (which I believe refers to Neterion's technology, since thats what Sun has been mainly supporting)

This demonstrates how serious 10 Gig Ethernet is going to be, particularly for end-to-end data transfer to high-end servers. Although Sun may not have an immediate market, I believe that its serious adoption of 10 Gig technology will help it emerge as a leader in this pace.

The 10 GigE effort discussed earlier with the codename 'Neptune' in this forum is expected to be part of every major Sun technology including the Niagara 2 and Rock servers expected to be released later this year.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Centillium's Mustang ONU Chipset

Centillium recently released its EPON ONU Mustang 200 ONU System on Chip (SOC). This ONU may be operated with Centillium's Colt OLT, or any other 802.3ah compliant OLT. The produce specifications are available here. In brief, the Mustang can support 8 classes of service and 256 multicast addresses.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Robert Metcalfe to be inducted in Hall of Fame

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, is one of the 18 inventors to be inducate d into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the United States. Other people chosen this year include the inventor of MRI. Congratulations!!!

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Meriton with Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET)

LightReading has an interesting article here on Meriton's plans for a new technology called Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET). The idea is to switch Gigabit Ethernet tunnels directly on the WDM layer instead of doing it a layer 3. The article talks about end-to-end Ethernet delivered via backbone networks and the Ethernet PON. If anyone has some more insights into this technology please post a comment on this forum.