ECOC 2014: Industry reflections on the show

Gazettabyte asked several attendees at the recent ECOC show, held in Cannes, to comment on key developments and trends they noted, as well as the issues they will track in the coming year. 

Daryl Inniss, practice leader, components at market research firm, Ovum

 It took a while to unwrap what happened at ECOC 2014. There was no one defining event or moment that was the highlight of the conference.

The location was certainly beautiful and the weather lovely. Yet I felt the participants were engaged with critical technical and business issues, given how competitive the market has become.

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OIF defines carrier requirements for SDN

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has achieved its first milestone in defining the carrier requirements for software-defined networking (SDN).

"The orchestration layer will coordinate the data centre and transport network activities and give ... easy access to new applications"

Hans-Martin Foisel, OIF

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Apps over packet-optical: Ciena boosts 6500's packet handling

Source: Ciena

Ciena has enhanced its packet-optical equipment portfolio by adding packet support to its flagship 6500 platform.

Cards and software from Ciena's established Carrier Ethernet packet platforms have been added to the 6500, a packet-optical platform that features reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexing (ROADM), WaveLogic3 coherent transponders, Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching and SONET/SDH aggregation.

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NextIO simplifies top of rack switching with I/O virtualisation

NextIO has developed virtualised input/output (I/O) equipment that simplifies switch design in the data centre.

"Our box takes a single virtual NIC, virtualises that and shares that out with all the servers in a rack"

John Fruehe, NextIO 

The platform, known as vNET, replaces both Fibre Channel and Ethernet top-of-rack switches in the data centre and is suited for use with small one rack unit (1RU) servers. The platform uses PCI Express (PCIe) to implement I/O virtualisation.

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OFC/NFOEC 2013: Technical paper highlights

Source: The Optical Society

Network evolution strategies, state-of-the-art optical deployments, next-generation PON and data centre interconnect are just some of the technical paper highlights of the upcoming OFC/NFOEC conference and exhibition, to be held in Anaheim, California from March 17-21, 2013. Here is a selection of the papers.

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EZchip expands the role of the network processor

• EZchip's NPS-400 will be a 200Gbps duplex chip capable of layer 2 to layer 7 network processing
• The device is being aimed at edge routers and the data centre
• First samples by year end

EZchip Semiconductor has announced a class of network processor capable of performing traditional data plane processing as well as higher layer networking tasks.
EZchip's announced NPS will extend the role of the network processor to encompass layer two to layer seven of the network. Source: EZchip
"It [the device family] is designed to provide processing for all the networking layers, from layer two all the way to layer seven," says Amir Eyal, EZChip’s vice president of business development. Network processors typically offer layer-two and layer-three processing only.

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OFC/NFOEC 2012: Technical paper highlights

Source: The Optical Society

Novel technologies, operators' experiences with state-of-the-art optical deployments and technical papers on topics such as next-generation PON and 400 Gigabit and 1 Terabit optical transmission are some of the highlights of the upcoming OFC/NFOEC conference and exhibition, to be held in Los Angeles from March 4-8, 2012. Here is a taste of some of the technical paper highlights.

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