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BTW, the Light Reading guys were the ones who "broke" this story back on January 6th

I would say the war is nearly over. Cisco will break out the old saying, Resistence is futile, you will be assimilated.

For example, their tests for the Cisco CRS-1 are available here and their results here. The beast qualifies as both big iron and very fast switch to me... Watch and learn ;)

For example, their tests for the Cisco CRS-1 are available here and their results here. The beast qualifies as both big iron and very fast switch to me... Watch and learn ;)

I just submitted this story to /., I'm assuming it doesn't get listed.

Verizon and Motorola announce deal

Basically, they are using Motorola set top boxes to deliver video feeds off of their Fiber. I would expect it soon.

To reach solid decision's, youl'l need more infermation then the slashdot writeup supplies. Like this article featured on linuxtoday.com, which are surely slightly more independent than IBMs' press release's; (click complete story under the summary) From it:

The DS8000 is unique in the industry because it features two logical partitions too run management or utility applications such as the companies SAN Volume Controller and Tivoli Storage Manager for backup and data management.

That sounds like a pretty interesting feature. Anybody's in the industry care to comment on the portential for these new development?

This article on lightreading.com elaborates a little more.

IBM's DS8000 handles virtualization different then the competition. While HDS does virtualization in the controller and EMC plans virtualization on intelligent switches IBMs' new system does virtualization at the chip level (see EMC on Virtualization: Wait for Us ). Using the Power5's IBM Virtual Engine, the DS800 can divide servers into logical partitions (LPARs). Each LPAR can run different storage systems that run separate code. ... "You can run different operating systems, even different releases of operating systems on isolated LPAR's. Rock!"

Thats a truly impressive level of flexibility their. And of course, its great for Linux, the ability to run multiple OSe's in hardware on one box play's to Linuxes strength's and deal's a blow to Microsoft's monopoly lockin strategy. What Im really shocked about is that there slashdot writeup included only some bland "durr big numbers" product placement, while IBM is effecting an interesting Linux-related change's in the marketplace's if you look a little deeper.

--sig: why a duck?

For an example of true 3D chip stacking, see Infineon's SOLID technology. Infineon announced that in 2002. Intel and Sharp have also played around with similar approaches.

The Infineon approach is interesting because it puts a layer of copper between the chips. Getting heat out of the middle of the stack is a major problem with all stacking schemes. Infineon claims to address this, but it's not clear how well. You're probably not going to stack up a pile of 50 watt CPUs with this technology. RAM, maybe. Low-duty-cycle flash memory, no problem. Music players are the obvious application.

Not much seems to have come from that technology since the 2002 announcement. So far, none of these stacking schemes have been useful. They're smaller, but not cheaper.

Nah, copper ethernet is going just as strong as fiber ethernet:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=48 337

QNX Powers Universal Media Gateway for Next-Generation Digital Video Networks
QNX Software Systems today announced that the QNX® Neutrino® realtime operating system (RTOS) will be shipping as part of the Cisco uMG9850 QAM Module, a new quadrature amplitude modulation product designed to let cable operators use Gigabit Ethernet to deliver video-on-demand and other multimedia services efficiently and cost-effectively to TV set-top receivers.

'Little OS that could' just might
"In a deal signed two years ago, Cisco (csco) chose QNX as its preferred real-time OS vendor as part of Cisco's 'ongoing efforts to increase the reliability and availability of data-voice-video networks.' Since then, not much seems to have materialized from the partnership."

Cisco's HFR is here
"The IOS-XR operating system kernel was acquired from QNX Software Systems, a small Canadian developer of realtime operating system code to companies in the automotive, communications, defense, industrial automation and medical device markets. Cisco already ships QNX operating system code in its uMG9850 QAM digital video module for the Catalyst 4500 Gigabit Ethernet switch."

Cisco Unveils the HFR
" The transition is analagous to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) moving from DOS-based operating systems to Windows NT, says analyst Stephen Kamman of CIBC World Markets.

Just as NT did, IOS XR could begin trickling down to lower-level systems, eventually permeating Cisco's entire portfolio, including edge and enterprise boxes. "The question is how quickly they can push that software through the product line," Kamman says."

"The software is based on a kernel licensed from QNX Software Systems, but tailored for the job. 'We have made some pretty substantial modifications to [the QNX code] that are Cisco proprietary,' Volpi says."

[Disclaimer: This is a very happy QNX Employee.]

Cisco Goes for an Open-Source Spin

For those that found a dead link, a better article: 'Better' TCP Invented

Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.

Personally, I'm in favor of the model that has the city building the infrastructure, and telcos (note the use of plural) handle the stuff in the pipes. ILECs seem fond of just providing enough service to get by, and spending lots of time protecting their turf from rogues who want silly things like modern telecommunications services. It's no bloody wonder that wireless carriers are wiping the floor with them. Like many, I use no services of the ILEC in my home.

The paper seems quite light on the subject ("ATM" only occurs twice)...

but indeed Marconi sank billions of cash into it.

Not everyone was happy ;-)

The three big US phone companies are planning for fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP). They have RFPs out to suppliers. Field testing is expected to start next year.

I happened to come across an article in BusinessWeek today talking about a lawsuit between Cisco and Huawei Technologies.

Here is a link to a news article on the subject: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=31 253

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., the Chinese networking manufacturer involved in a bitter patent and copyright lawsuit with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO - message board), is fighting back against Cisco's legal attack and has outlined its defense in recent court papers.

The gist of Huawei's defense: While the company admits some of its routing products once held a small amount of Cisco IOS code, it says it no longer sells those routing products. It also denies there was any conspiracy to copy Cisco products.

This puts a whole new twist on the situation.

• IPv6- The Next Generation Internet - About IPv6.
• IPv6 Forum
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) - IPv6 at Sun.
• No shortage of IP addresses - Cnet Asia
• Big players push IPv6, but masses resist.
• Ready for IPv6 - PC World
• Ready for IPv6, Part 2 - PC World
• Verio Brings IPv6 to North America
• NTT Com Expands IPv6 Coverage
• KDDI Labs Pilots IPv6 Network Between Japan and the US
• Foundry Does 10GigE for N+I
• Perspective: IPv6, the Net's next frontier

• IPv6- The Next Generation Internet - About IPv6.
• IPv6 Forum
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) - IPv6 at Sun.
• No shortage of IP addresses - Cnet Asia
• Big players push IPv6, but masses resist.
• Ready for IPv6 - PC World
• Ready for IPv6, Part 2 - PC World
• Verio Brings IPv6 to North America
• NTT Com Expands IPv6 Coverage
• KDDI Labs Pilots IPv6 Network Between Japan and the US
• Foundry Does 10GigE for N+I
• Perspective: IPv6, the Net's next frontier

This way carriers will soon be offering ethernet access, without having to abandon their ample investments in SONET.

Expect to hear about this technology a lot in the coming years.

Read more here.

Enter EoS in the searchbox at the upper left.

Roberts' company is Caspian Networks and here is a link to their QoS and scalability claims...

Let's not read the marketing fluff on the website. It goes without saying that engineering is always wondering, "Okay, what did marketing say this time?" At least, that's what we did at my previous, defunct router startup.

Caspian isn't really pushing their scalability story anyway. Now it's more about their flow-based QoS, and that's not even new. They're just doing it in hardware. Or so says the telecom tabloid.

--
Dum de dum.

From: Dana Blankenhorn Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 15:19:24 -0500 Subject: Re: [IP] RIAA hopes to make ISPs pay for user's P2Pdownloads I post this old story as a reminder that what Hilary Rosen is suggesting is, technically, impossible. It's impossible to tell what Internet packets are being used for. In the link above, Panama tried to stop Voice over IP in order to protect the monopoly of Cable & Wireless (as well as its own tax revenues). While VOIP (and peer to peer services) may use specific designated ports that can be turned off, the software can be quickly configured to use other ports, including the ports on which e-mail and Web traffic is based. I don't know if Rosen knows this. I don't know that Rosen cares. But it's clear that RIAA is becoming increasingly frustrated with what appears to be an unannounced, unsponsored, unorganized, unsupervised, grassroots yet surprisingly effective economic boycott of a huge industry, namely musical recording.

Wow!
Screw the law, I got mine!

Lets us know where your working after your done with school, I want to be sure to stear my investments away from that company (Enron2).
Seriously, This isn't about who has the best tools, or even the best prices. It's about circumvention, bypassing, and subverting the law, and the rights of the citizens of the States.

There's no such thing as an ok, shady business deal.
At least there shouldn't be, but then again, the Administration that was going to restore integrity to the office of President of the United States, changed the rules so that the Government can continue to do business with individuals and corperations that have been caught breaking the law.

Here's how it worked, according to the former WorldCom employee: WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
"There was massive connectivity growth, but UUNET's business wasn't growing as much, "says the former employee.

Here's how it worked, according to the former WorldCom employee: WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
"There was massive connectivity growth, but UUNET's business wasn't growing as much, "says the former employee.

Nice idea - but Marconni killed off their FTTH product line. (Website is out of date)

See this analysis of their most recent reorganization

There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.

FYI Packet Engines was acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.

Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.

Read the same article on an optical trade publication, Light Reading at OFS: What Fiber Glut?.

More interestingly read the comments of some industry people.

This is just marketing hype folks!!!

Read the same article on an optical trade publication, Light Reading at OFS: What Fiber Glut?.

More interestingly read the comments of some industry people.

This is just marketing hype folks!!!

Lightreading's article, Hyperchip Hypes Its Hardware, claims that Hyperchip stands out in 2 ways:

1) "It's aiming to create something much more than a bigger, faster, box. It's aiming to create the Internet equivalent of a Class 5 telephone switch, something that would sit at the edge of optical backbones and handle IP connections to tens of thousands of users. Hyperchip's developments would potentially replace entire ISP POPs (points of presence) and would have an aggregate capacity measured in - get this - petabits a second."

2) "Hyperchip is addressing this requirement in a totally different (some would say bizarre) way. It's devoted most of its efforts into adapting supercomputer hardware to deliver the scalability it requires. Software - considered the key to success by most terabit router vendors and users - seems to be of secondary importance to the Montreal based startup."

The article says that trials will start at the end of the year. That should prove interesting...

Another thing is that article is misleading; they really received $12M in funding, and added another $31M in repayable loans from the Canadian government. Again, the numbers quoted in the article are Canadian dollars, not US.

Several terabit router companies have failed (such as Ironbridge ) and others are having problems, a la Avici along with Nexabit.

For more entertainment, read the article and comments in Light Reading.

It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?

The article is pretty short on technical details - go figure. I'll start by pointing people to a site that I like - while not always 100% accurate - it is much better than most out there.

Go to http://www.lightreading.com/ and look up MEMs

Lucent among many others is developing MEMs technology for switching beams of light in telecom systems. The basics for MEMs technology is understood by a bunch of companies that use it for such mundane things such as accelerometers in air bag deployment systems. Now many of them are looking to use this basic technology of building mechanical things on a chip to create better communication systems.

Since a MEMs device is basically just a mirror that can be adjusted to bounce light to a different place - it can be used in a couple of different ways.

The simplest way is to use MEMs devices to act like an optical patch panel. A bunch of fibers come in, and a bunch go out. The MEMs device bounces light from one of the input fibers to one of the output fibers. If someone has used DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) to put a bunch of signals on that one fiber, all of them get switched together. BUT there is no optical-electrical-optical conversion, so the switching system doesn't need to know much about what it is switching. It could be OC-192 SONET or 10Gb ethernet and it really doesn't care. A very cool benefit.

A slightly more complex way to use MEMs devices is to take the different wavelengths of light in a DWDM system and split them out. Then bounce these individual wavelengths through the MEMs device. Take the wavelengths comeing out and combine them back together into a different set of fibers. The problem with this is that if you can't put two signals using the exact same wavelength down the same desination fiber. This can be solved with devices that convert the wavelength, but today that usually involves an optical-eletrical-optical conversion.

The one big plus of MEMs devices is that you avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion that can be costly for the electronics, and requires the electronics to be set up for the exact kind of signal you are passing through. The one big minus to MEMs devices is that they all "eat" some of the light going through them. A loss of a couple dB is not uncommon. This means that you can't avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion forever. As the technology matures, it will get better with less light loss, but it will take time.

Note - MEMs devices today are *not* for doing packet switching. They are more for doing optical circuit switching. They typically take a relatively long time to move from one posisition to another (10 millisecons or more). In that amount of time, you could have a shitload of data go through your system. There are companies working on doing an all optical packet switch, but that is a ways off yet today.

Corvis' switch is probably using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) technology. To make an NxN switch, you passively split each of N incoming signals into N parts, and then send each part through an SOA (N^2 total SOA's).

When there is no current applied to an SOA, it is a strong absorber. So you only apply current to N of the N^2 SOA's, and those will be the only paths that allow light to pass. Then you take the N^2 paths and combine them in an interleaved pattern back into N paths forming the outputs of the switch.

The article I read claims Corvis' switch is 6x6. The advantage over MEMS is that there are no moving parts. The disadvantage is that you cannot easily make big switches since this scales as N^2, and that the noise figure is fundamentally high because of the 1XN splitting loss.

lightreading article

Corvis's switch is an all-optical switch. No eletrical regeneration involved. What it is switching is wavelengths of light. NOT packets. So, you can take a wavelength of light from one fiber and send it out another. This allows you to set up 2.5Gbps (OC-48) circuits quickly.

What technology are they using - don't won't say. Almost all other people in this arena are basically splitting the dense-wave-division-multiplexed (DWDM) circuits into their individual wavelengths. Then routing them through micro-mirrors. The micro-mirrors allow you to connect any two fibers together optically. Then, the outputs from this are re-combined, optically amplified and transmitted.

This isn't for sure what Corvis is doing - but I would bet money that this is basically what they are doing.

One problem with this is that you can't have two circuits on a fiber using the same wavelength of light. So, you would need something that shifts the wavelength of light being used. Nobody that I know of has a commercial product to do this.

Press blurb about this particular thing is available in a Light Reading article.

A couple of weeks ago, Corvis announced that they had revenue - from this shipment of course.

One more link - Some hints to what technology they are using.

Corvis's switch is an all-optical switch. No eletrical regeneration involved. What it is switching is wavelengths of light. NOT packets. So, you can take a wavelength of light from one fiber and send it out another. This allows you to set up 2.5Gbps (OC-48) circuits quickly.

What technology are they using - don't won't say. Almost all other people in this arena are basically splitting the dense-wave-division-multiplexed (DWDM) circuits into their individual wavelengths. Then routing them through micro-mirrors. The micro-mirrors allow you to connect any two fibers together optically. Then, the outputs from this are re-combined, optically amplified and transmitted.

This isn't for sure what Corvis is doing - but I would bet money that this is basically what they are doing.

One problem with this is that you can't have two circuits on a fiber using the same wavelength of light. So, you would need something that shifts the wavelength of light being used. Nobody that I know of has a commercial product to do this.

Press blurb about this particular thing is available in a Light Reading article.

A couple of weeks ago, Corvis announced that they had revenue - from this shipment of course.

One more link - Some hints to what technology they are using.

Corvis's switch is an all-optical switch. No eletrical regeneration involved. What it is switching is wavelengths of light. NOT packets. So, you can take a wavelength of light from one fiber and send it out another. This allows you to set up 2.5Gbps (OC-48) circuits quickly.

What technology are they using - don't won't say. Almost all other people in this arena are basically splitting the dense-wave-division-multiplexed (DWDM) circuits into their individual wavelengths. Then routing them through micro-mirrors. The micro-mirrors allow you to connect any two fibers together optically. Then, the outputs from this are re-combined, optically amplified and transmitted.

This isn't for sure what Corvis is doing - but I would bet money that this is basically what they are doing.

One problem with this is that you can't have two circuits on a fiber using the same wavelength of light. So, you would need something that shifts the wavelength of light being used. Nobody that I know of has a commercial product to do this.

Press blurb about this particular thing is available in a Light Reading article.

A couple of weeks ago, Corvis announced that they had revenue - from this shipment of course.

One more link - Some hints to what technology they are using.

Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.

Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.

I've found that kind of funny, as Cisco have been getting very bad press lately. The London Internet Exchange - the major networking hub in the UK has got totally fed up with them. Story here.