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Friday, August 5, 2011 at 2:43PM Gazettabyte spoke with Steve Alexander, CTO of Ciena, about optical technology and R&D. In Part 1 of the Q&A, Alexander shares his thoughts about the practice and challenges of R&D.
Part 1: R&D
"The R&D model has shifted a lot. Time has marched on and there are newer ways of doing things"
Steve Alexander, Ciena CTO
Monday, August 1, 2011 at 11:12AM Chart Watch: LightCounting
Summing transceiver shipments in the core of the network and plotting the data against traffic growth provides useful insights into the state of the network.
"We use transceiver shipment data [from vendors] to calculate how fast the network is growing and compare it to the traffic growth," says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 9:31AM Recent market research suggests that the 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) era is fast-approaching and that 100Gbps promises to leave the 40Gbps market opportunity in its wake.
“It could easily be ten to 15 years before we see 100Gbps in a big way on the public network side”
Mark Lutkowitz, Telecom Pragmatics
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:32AM Chart Watch: Ovum Components
The service provider industry, including wireless and wireline players, is up 6% year-on-year (2Q10 to 1Q11) to reach US $1.82 trillion, according to Ovum. The equipment market, mainly telecom vendors but also the likes of Brocade, has also shown strong growth - up 15% - to reach revenues of over $41.4 billion. But the most striking growth has occurred in the optical components market, up 28%, to achieve revenues of over $6 billion, says the market research firm.
Source: Ovum
Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 5:56PM Gazettabyte spoke with Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems, about the ROADM market, the company's plans following its latest funding round, and the idea of a WSS-on-a-chip.
The reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) market has been the best performing segment of the optical networking market over the last year. According to Infonetics Research, ROADM-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) equipment grew 20% from Q2, 2010 to Q1, 2011 whereas the overall optical networking market grew 7%.
“It’s the Moore’s Law: Every two years we are doubling the capacity in terms of channel count and port count”
Larry Schwerin, Capella
1x20 WSS, Capella, Gridless, Infonetics, ROADM, SingTel, Verizon, colourless, directionless in CEO Interview Print Article Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 7:37PM EZchip Semiconductor has disclosed the first 200 Gigabit-per-second network processor chip. The NP-5 will double the packet processing performance of the company’s existing NP-4 network processor and will sample at the end of 2012.
“We don’t know of any device, announced at least, that comes close to this”
Amir Eyal, EZchip
The NP-5 is noteworthy in integrating within a single chip a full-duplex 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) packet processor and traffic manager. Such integration is important as line cards move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps densities, says Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 7:49AM Briefing: Optical Interconnect
Part 2: High-performance computing
IBM has adopted optical interfaces for its latest POWER7-based high-end computer system. Gazettabyte spoke to IBM Fellow, Ed Seminaro, about high-performance computing and the need for optics to address bandwidth and latency requirements.
“At some point when you go a certain distance you have to go to an optical link”
Ed Seminaro, IBM Fellow
IBM has used parallel optics for its latest POWER7 computing systems, the Power 775. The optical interfaces are used to connect computing node drawers that make up the high-end computer. Each node comprises 32 POWER7 chips, with each chip hosting eight processor cores, each capable of running up to four separate programming tasks or threads.
Using optical engines, each node – a specialised computing card - has a total bandwidth of 224, 120 Gigabit-per-second (12x10Gbps) VCSEL-based transmitters and 224, 120Gbps receivers. The interfaces can interconnect up to 2,048 nodes, over half a million POWER7 cores, with a maximum network diameter of only three link hops.
IBM claims that with the development of the Power 775, it has demonstrated the superiority of optics over copper for high-end computing designs.
