OTN hardware gets the 100 Gigabit treatment

AppliedMicro’s TPACK unit has unveiled the first of its 100 Gigabit Optical Transport Network (OTN) designs. Two devices were announced in November 2010 - the TPOT414 and TPOT424 - that perform 100 Gigabit mapping and framing functions, while in December a 100 Gigabit OTN muxponder (multiplexer-transponder) was announced that combines several of its designs.

 “The real market demand is for simple systems - the transponder and interfaces to the routers"

Lars Pedersen, AppliedMicro

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u2t Photonics: Adapting to a changing marketplace

Jens Fiedler, vice president sales and marketing (left), and CEO Andreas Umbach.

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Networking towards the cloud

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MultiPhy eyes 40 and 100 Gigabit direct-detect and coherent schemes

Visiting Israeli start-up MultiPhy at its office in Ness Ziona, near Rehovot, involves dancing around boxes. “We are about to move,” apologises Ronen Weinberg, director of product management at MultiPhy. But the company will not have to travel far. It is crossing buildings in the same Ness Ziona Science Park, moving in next to Finisar’s Israeli headquarters.

MultiPhy's Avi Shabtai (left) and Ronen Weinberg

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Cisco's P-OTS: Denser and distributed

Cisco Systems’ carrier packet transport (CPT) product family adds metro packet optical transport to its existing switch and router offerings.

Cisco claims the CPT is its second-generation packet optical transport system (P-OTS), complementing the ONS 15454. But some analysts view the CPT as the vendor’s first true packet optical transport product.

"This announcement is an acknowledgement that P-OTS equipment is important and that operators are insisting on it"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

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Xilinx's 400 Gigabit Ethernet FPGA

Xilinx has detailed its latest 28nm CMOS Virtex-7 FPGA family that will support 400 Gigabit Ethernet on a single device. The Virtex-7HT completes the Virtex-7, joining the Virtex-7T and Virtex-7XT product families announced in June.

A single FPGA will support 400 Gigabit Ethernet duplex traffic. The FPGA can also support 4x100Gig MACs and 4x150Gbps Interlaken interfaces. Source: Xilinx

Why is it important?

Xilinx says its switch and router customers are more than doubling the traffic capacity of their platforms every three years. “They are looking for silicon that will support a doubling of capacity within the same form-factor and the same power budget,” says Giles Peckham, EMEA marketing director at Xilinx.  

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Virtualisation set to transform data centre networking

Briefing:  Data centre switching

Part 3: Networking developments

The adoption of virtualisation techniques is causing an upheaval in the data centre. Virtualisation is being used to boost server performance, but its introduction is changing how switching equipment is networked.

“This is the most critical period of data centre transformation seen in decades,” says Raju Rajan, global system networking evangelist at IBM.

“We are on a long hard path – it is going to be a really challenging transition”

Stephen Garrison, Force10 Networks

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