SC09: And the winner is…

As promised we are excited to announce the winning result from our Laserwire® weight competition at Supercomputing 09.

Our question was: What is the % savings in weight of a 10 meter Laserwire active optical cable compared to a 10 meter RJ-45 cat6a cable?

The correct answer is: 85.46%

Check out the pictures of the Laserwire 10m cable weighing in at 98 grams and the Cat6a 10m cable with 674 grams.

The iPOD will go to the lucky winner from Stanford University who had the closest guess of 85.5%.

For more information about low latency, low power, low weight and low cost 10GbE connectivity please visit our website.

5 Minutes with Jag Bolaria, Linley Group

Last month the Linley Group hosted the Data Center Networking seminar in San Jose, California. We took a few moments with Linley analyst, Jag Bolaria, to talk about the future of the optics industry and specifically his view on the war between Optics and Copper technologies.

JM: In the early 2000’s, the general view was that the telecommunications industry had significantly over-invested in fiber optic infrastructure – do you think the investment has caught up with the industry needs of today?

JB: Yes, a lot of money went into the telecom infrastructure and that was followed by a significant cut back in new equipment. In fact, this cut back continued for more than seven years. Since 2000, the traffic mix has shifted dramatically to data from voice—and in the future video will drive further growth in traffic. This new makeup of traffic requires an infrastructure that is designed more for data and video rather than built upon voice technologies. Consequently, in 2009 and 2010 we are at the beginning of an update to the telecom infrastructure—an update that will shift the infrastructure technologies from TDM and SONET/SDH to packet traffic, Carrier Ethernet and OTN.

JM: What areas in fiber optic infrastructure do you foresee organizations investing in as we move into 2010?

JB: The fiber optic infrastructure growth will be driven by OTN technologies, which include data rates of 40Gbps and 100Gbps. Much of this growth will be driven by carriers and a need by the carriers to consolidate multiple transport technologies to OTN and Carrier Ethernet.

JM: When do you predict the war between Optics and Copper will end – or will it?

JB: Instead of a war, we see these as complementary technologies for the most part. Clearly, long haul uses optics today and will continue to use optics. In the Enterprise, distances greater than 100 meters will continue to be optics. At 10Gbps, optics offers a low power solution, which will continue to dominate for several years. Once 10GBase-T can reduce power dissipation to less than 2W, it will offer another alternative for OEMs and end users. This alternative will be particularly attractive for LOM designs. In this type of the larger landscape, we expect both copper and optics to continue shipping volume in millions of units.

JM: How do you see the Optics Components vendor landscape evolving over the next 5 years?

JB: We expect 10Gbps optical port shipments to increase rapidly for the next 3-5 years. This will lead to further consolidation and will favor vertically integrated suppliers for optical modules.

Thanks for your time today, Jag.

Finisar at Supercomputing09: Event Wrap-Up

What a week at SC09 in beautiful Portland. Maybe the weather was a little chilly but with over 10,000 attendees this was definitely the hot event in the HPC community. Looking at the traffic at Finisar and the booths of other optics companies it has become obvious that HPC and optics connect in a big way. From OEMs to System Integrators to the actual End-User, Active Optical Cables are becoming the interconnect of choice when it comes to InfiniBand QDR and 10GbE Cluster Installations.

With respect to InfiniBand, our Quadwire™ cables helped to connect this year’s SCinet Network and Mellanox’s intrabooth connections. On the 10GbE side we powered a link in the Myricom booth and demonstrated Network convergence of InfiniBand and 10GbE in a live demonstration at the Mellanox booth with our Laserwire® (www.laserwire.org) product.

In case you missed our Second Source Partnership announcement with Foxconn shortly before SC09, please read about it here.

At our booth we had a number of industry first demonstrations including: the first active optical cable implementation of a CXP to 3x QSFP breakout cable, a Laserwire® active copper cable, and a QSFP to Laserwire adapter.

Let’s not forget the fantastic Laserwire Girl who was cruising the show floor promoting our Laserwire cable technology.

And if you were one of the folks to enter our iPOD competition on guessing the weight savings comparing a 10m cat6a cable with a 10m Laserwire cable, then you’ll be excited to know the results of this contest to be announced later next week. So be sure to check back soon.

I look forward to any comments or experiences you would like to share from SC09.

Finisar Welcomes You at SuperComputing 2009

Next week Finisar will eagerly join the SuperComputing 2009 coterie in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Now in its 22nd year, SC09 is the premier conference and exhibition on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. With more than 11,000 expected attendees, it is an industry event not to be missed.

While there will be much to do at SC09, I whole heartedly invite you to join the Finisar Welcome Reception at our booth #1812 from 7-9pm on Monday, November 16th. There will be plenty of refreshments and great conversation to go around, not to mention a special drawing for an iPOD.

During the exhibition, we especially look forward to sharing with you the latest technology developments and booth demonstrations of our cable family including Laserwire® for 10GbE, Quadwire™ for 40GbE and InfiniBand QDR, and C.wire™ for 100GbE and InfiniBand QDR.

On Wednesday, November 18th, 5:30pm to 7:00pm, be sure to join me at the Birds-of-a-Feather Session on Solving Interconnect Bottle Necks with Optical Technologies. Hosted by Marek Tlalka of Luxtera, this exciting topic will discuss the demands for bandwidth intensive services and explore distinct approaches in solving this bottleneck problem.

On Thursday, November 19th at 1:30pm, be sure to stop by Mellanox booth #1301 for my presentation on the “Convergence of cabling options in InfiniBand and Ethernet environments”.

See you at the show!

C.wire active optical cable: The Story Behind the Name

Did you wonder how we came up with the name for C.wire™, the latest addition to our Active Optical Cable (AOC) family?

When we started our AOC family, the first product name, Laserwire™, was born in our engineering department. Finisar engineer Luke Ekkizogloy even developed the little symbol on top of the logo to illustrate a serial active optical cable.

The second member of our AOC family, Quadwire™, a 40 Gb/s parallel active optical cable, followed the naming structure of its predecessor. Since “Quad” equals four, we included 4 dots next to the logo as an easy way to illustrate four logical full duplex links, each capable of 10 Gb/s, running at an aggregate data rate of 40 Gb/s.

So, how did we come up with C.wire? This product was created to deliver 100 Gb/s+ connectivity, therefore, borrowing from the Roman numeral system, we used “C” to denote 100. At the same time, “C” also represents the Hexadecimal number for 12, the number of logical full duplex links in this parallel optical cable. And if this gets too confusing, you can also look to the logo for a hint. Each of the 12 lanes can drive 12.5 Gb/s of data with an aggregate bandwidth of 150 Gb/s for the cable, which is the highest bandwidth in the smallest and densest form factor available today.

It’s no secret that a lot of thinking goes into the naming of a new product and yes, we are looking forward to the challenge of developing our next logo and product name if you ever need more bandwidth…

By the way, “C.wire” beat the name D^2Wire – wonder why?