CTO blog
Recruitment in the upturn
25 June 2010
What a difference a year makes! At the start of 2009 we were in the depths of the recession and all semiconductor companies were hurting. Worldwide companies were laying off 20-30% of the workforce as sales were plummeting.
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New benchmark in 10G Switching
27 April 2010
Arista Networks announced last week their first modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch, the 7500, with a stunning 384 10GbE ports in a 11U rack-mounted chassis. Not only does this switch show the way forward in terms of port density, it also dramatically reduces power consumption and cost to respectively 13 watts and $1,200 per port.
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Equalization – it is not the number of taps that counts
1 February 2010
When you’re reading this Designcon2010 is probably in full swing and hosts of engineers are flocking to the Santa Clara Convention Centre. This year it promises again to be a key event for anybody interested in Signal Integrity and High Speed serial connections. All the players in this area are rolling out their latest design tools, test and measurement equipment and signal integrity solutions.
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Consumer Optical Interconnect — serious connectivity?
14 December 2009
It is nearing Christmas time and lists with top 10 predictions for the next year are appearing on blogs and in magazines alike. No, I will not give you my own top 10, but I want to venture to make one prediction: optical connectivity will make serious headway in consumer electronics.
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Active and Passive – what is the difference?
5 November 2009
Copper cables seem to be the latest and coolest 10G data center interconnect. Every new piece of high-speed switching gear, as well as NICs and HBAs seem to include support for these SFP+ cables. The SFF Committee is even working on a special new MSA, SFF-8461 to ensure interoperability.
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The battle of the data center: 10GBASE-T vs. SFP+
6 Oct 2009
The need for high-speed connectivity in the data center is continuing to grow at an unrelenting pace. Technologies that offer solutions in this area have attracted a large amount of investment, but 10GBASE-T really stands out. Since 2002, various startups have raised in excess of $300m to develop chip solutions that can offer viable 10GBASE-T connections, and more money will have been ploughed into this by established players like Broadcom.
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EDC and next generation PON
28 Sept 2009
Now ADSL is dead and GPON and GEPON are fighting over who will be the next king, the industry is already working on the next generation of even higher speed access technologies. The IEEE is furthest ahead, with 10G EPON (or IEEE802.3av to be precise), but the FSAN community is working hard to define an even better technology, XGPON.
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Hot Chips for Cool Data Centers
31 Aug 2009
According to an interesting article in the Register, it seems that many data centers are being run too cold. It is well known that cooling represents a significant part of the cost of running a data center, both from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective. Major data centres use a huge amount of watts, costing their owners upwards of $30m a year for electricity. Then consider that up to 37% of a data center's energy costs can be attributed to cooling infrastructure (or CRAC – Computer Room Air Conditioning), it is clear that taking a closer look at the temperature of the data center is a worthwhile exercise.
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