Infinera has been one of the optical industry’s disruptors, helping to boost capacity and lower the costs of both inter- and intracity networks. Now the company is turning its attention to subsea networks, as evidenced by its demo of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC)-based DTN system that transmitted data over a 4,000-kilometer, third-party subsea network. Infinera DTN has 25 Gigahertz (GHz) channel spacing vs. 50GHz spacing on the pre-existing equipment — in other words, double the network capacity.

Subsea systems typically have subsea optical amplifiers and submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) located in terrestrial landing stations and connected to the either end of the amplifier chain. With its new DTN system, Infinera has replaced the pre-existing SLTE systems. With bandwidth demand continuing to grow at about 50 percent a year, innovations like these are what’s necessary to keep our digital lives humming.

Twitter This Article   Facebook This Article   Email This Article

10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; NewTeeVee Re-Run: Paul McCartney Cooks Mashed Potatoes NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: DTN, Infinera, Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC), SubSea Cables

I’m a geek groupie when it comes to technology. I can’t actually produce any of these life-changing products, but I can recognize something cool when I see it. And the 100-Gigabit data transfer demo that Ciena was showing off at SC 08 in Austin, Texas, today was very cool. Unlike previous demonstrations, Ciena’s was a 100-Gigabit data transfer over a single channel, rather than one aggregated over multiple channels.

The product isn’t available for commercial use yet (and there’s no date set for when it will be), but when it is, customers will be able to upgrade their existing fiber equipment with the Ciena kit to 100G. Other players, from Infinera to Alcatel-Lucent, are also trying to deliver 100G networks. Those speeds will help the core network handle the anticipated growth of Internet traffic, and lower the per-bit cost of delivering that traffic. In the video below, Dimple Amin, vice president of R&D and special projects at Ciena, talks about the demonstration, what it does and how far such traffic can travel. He also says there’s no technical reason why these speeds couldn’t be delivered at the edge of  the network to consumers’ homes. That would be the day.

Twitter This Article   Facebook This Article   Email This Article

10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; NewTeeVee Re-Run: Paul McCartney Cooks Mashed Potatoes NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, cien, Ciena, Infinera

Drew Perkins, the CTO of Infinera, which sells Internet optical transport equipment, says that video is soaking up the Internet’s bandwidth — and lucky for him, driving the optical networking business.

For those of you who don’t know what the optical transport layer is, it’s the bottom layer plumbing of the Internet. Back in 2000/2001 when Perkins and his colleagues started the company he was optimistic that the Internet would still grow significantly — and of course they were proven right. “Back then, we thought the optical transport layer was about 10 gigabit technology. We’ll need some thing more than 40 gigabit, up to 100 gigabit and higher as the Internet grows.”

What’s driving the growth? Video. “Video traffic is clearly the biggest consumer on the Internet,” and the addition of video traffic swamps all other traffic. “Video will completely swamp the network,” and there will be exponentially increasing bandwidth demand as video applications grow.

This effects the optical network industry because service providers will have to buy more capacity and deliver it faster. Every year, more technology means more workload. But with conventional technology this will break the network and cause huge problems, says Perkins. Infinera is looking to use photon-integrated circuitry to help solve this problem.

Twitter This Article   Facebook This Article   Email This Article

10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; NewTeeVee Re-Run: Paul McCartney Cooks Mashed Potatoes NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi ";

Posted by Katie Fehrenbacher on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: Infinera

Solarflare Communications, a chip startup in Irvine, Calif., has raised $26 million in a third round of funding. That brings the total the company’s raised to $126 million, which is a lot of money for a chip startup, even when you consider that the amount includes money raised by Level 5 Networks, which Solarflare acquired in April 2006. But the startup is hoping to use that money to attack a big problem in the data center at prices lower than the current technology offers. And if it succeeds, it’ll make computing faster and data center operations more flexible.

Like many other communications chip companies, Solarflare is working on a way to deliver 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper, which is cheaper than delivering it via fiber. That enables the high-speed transport technology to move outside of the telecommunications networks, where companies such as Infinera are already pursuing 100 Gigabit Ethernet over fiber, and into mass adoption in the data center. Getting the technology into servers at a reasonable cost would create a market 10 times bigger than that of networking switches.

Others chasing mass adoption of 10 GigE on the server side are Intel and Broadcom, which like Solarflare, have controller chips. Broadcom and Solarflare also have PHY chips sampling with customers. Solarflare CEO Russell Stern plans to integrate the PHY with the controller chip in 2009, beating Broadcom to the market. He will use some of the funding for that purpose.

It’s likely Broadcom will end up attempting an integrated 10 GigE over copper chip as well. Broadcom doesn’t talk about its chips until they’re sampling, but the company did make a mint by cornering the market for integrated 1 Gigabit Ethernet chips for servers. However, success for Solarflare or Broadcom is probably three years out and depends on creating an energy-efficient chip at the 32 nanometer process node, according to Bob Wheeler, an analyst at The Linley Group.

Power consumption is a big challenge for these chips because unless it’s managed properly, they run too hot for servers and switches. And because technology doesn’t stand still in the data center, where virtualization and ever-increasing amounts of data are screaming for fatter pipes, hybrid forms of networking technologies that mix fiber or Fibre Channel with Ethernet are emerging to bridge the Gigabit gap between servers and networking equipment. Broadcom has several products that take advantage of such a hybrid networking environment. Startups such as Arastra and Woven Systems are also in that sector, and may see gains at the expense of a unified 10GigE world, which means Solarflare’s market opportunity could fragment if cheap, integrated 10 GigE takes too long.

Twitter This Article   Facebook This Article   Email This Article

10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; NewTeeVee Re-Run: Paul McCartney Cooks Mashed Potatoes NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: Arastra, BRCM, Broadcom, Infinera, INFN, INTC, Intel, Solarflare, Woven systems

HP is trying to eliminate copper on semiconductors to make them run faster, and today the company is gathering about 150 researchers at its Palo Alto campus to push lasers as a means to do this. If it and chip manufacturers such as Intel, IBM and Luxtera succeed, the chip firms will follow in the telcos footsteps, turning to light to transmit information quickly.

Only, in this instance, the light would provide short-haul transport on a chipset measured in nanometers or millimeters rather than over distances of miles. Lasers could replace the copper connecting multiple processing engines inside a chip, but could also act as interconnects between multiple chips on a board. Light pulses provided by a laser could reduce the bill of materials (if adapted for silicon), power consumption and solve some of the problems associated with following Moore’s Law because it reduces some of the materials needed on a chip. Improved chips mean more computing power and a faster, more dynamic web.

Such efforts are in the early stages with real products likely 10 years out. However, it isn’t so far-fetched. Already Infinera, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company whose products are sold to telecommunications companies, makes an optical chip, but it builds its chips on a far more expensive substrate than a silicon wafer.

Twitter This Article   Facebook This Article   Email This Article

10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; NewTeeVee Re-Run: Paul McCartney Cooks Mashed Potatoes NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments
Tags: Hewlett-Packard, HPQ, IBM, Infinera, INTC, Intel, Luxtera