A Trip to China and A Top500 Award for Quadwire

This week’s Lightspeed post comes from guest blogger Tony Pearson, Finisar’s Director of Product Marketing.

A “lightspeed” visit to China! It was a short journey of only 3 days, with two halves and a tale of two cities, separated by a virtual “Great Wall”. The first half: a visit to Shanghai, both the city and one of the jewels in the Finisar homegrown facility treasury. The second: to Tianjin (approx. 150km from Beijing) to visit Dawning Information Industry Company Ltd. and their Nebulae Supercomputer installation. The virtual “Great Wall” I refer to was simply the barrier thrown up by Mother Nature to domestic flight schedules – during rainy season in Beijing we are reminded that no matter how fast our communication solutions become…she’s still the boss! I’ll focus on two halves and the cities for this post, but I’m always happy to recount my travel stories to the interested in a future blog post.

Let me begin with an event that I was honored to attend at the Dawning manufacturing facility in June for those companies, including Finisar, who helped enable the world’s #2 supercomputer “Nebulae” as ranked by the 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list. The event celebrated a milestone for Dawning as the #1 Supercomputer solution vendor in China and #2 in the world in terms of performance as ranked by the Top 500. Dawning further honored Finisar with a commemorative award for participation in Nebulae.

The Nebulae Supercomputer was at the center of the celebration with the event including a tour of Nebulae itself. The exciting thing for me, personally, was to see a supercomputer with over 120 server racks connected using Quadwire™ Active Optical Cables. This excitement only perhaps topped by the fact that these cables were designed and manufactured by Finisar at the very facility I visited the previous day.

Although not my first visit to China, this was my first visit to Shanghai and the Finisar Shanghai R&D and Manufacturing facility. Shanghai is truly a city in the fast lane, quite literally with some of the best kept and most functional highways I’ve seen in the world. With all eyes currently on the World Expo site located on the Huang Pu River running through the heart of downtown, this is a city in the same mold as Singapore, New York, London or Hong Kong, in my opinion, with a very cosmopolitan feel and population. With an infectious air of both maturity and optimism, this is a city that makes you want to keep coming back. The same is true of the Finisar Shanghai team and site in its newer location with a mix of both locally and globally educated talent, with a vast wealth of experience in the fiber optics business.

While this trip was focused on the high tech: high tech cities, high tech facilities, high tech computer solutions and high tech fiber optics, the real story here for me was about two Laws of Nature: “Bandwidth x Distance” limits combined with our relentless need for more information, pushing fiber solutions over longer distances now to our homes and to the Supercomputer in its most recent incarnation. And, then of course Mother Nature, who stamped her laws on my ability to move around China if not the data in the highly controlled environment of the Nebulae Supercomputer installation.

Finisar’s Tony Pearson (left) visits Dawning for a tour of the Nebulae – the World’s #2 Supercomputer as ranked by the 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list.

Video: Finisar EWP Wavelength Selective Switch Demo at OFC 2010

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.

5 Minutes with Roy Rubenstein, Publisher of gazettabyte

Q: Congratulations on today’s launch of gazettabyte. Tell us about your decision to launch this new optical communications website.

Roy Rubenstein (RR): It’s a combination of an ongoing interest in a fascinating industry and my experience of changes taking place in the media.

I have been covering the optical industry as an analyst and journalist for a decade and I find the industry’s business and technology challenges deeply interesting. I have also come to know and value many people in what remains a relatively small industry.

Changes in the trade press, brought on by reducing advertising revenues caused by the rise of the Internet and exacerbated by the downturn, have meant traditional industry trade titles have either closed or have little budget for freelancers.

In July 2009, the UK’s Institute of Physics closed FibreSystems Europe, a magazine I have been writing for since 2003. In that time I worked with three great editors and valued being able to research in-depth articles.

When FibreSystems closed I approached several magazines but had little joy. Either I got no response or the titles had no freelance budgets. I decided to launch gazettabyte. In the age of Twitter and content management systems, everyone is now a publisher: engineers, marketing managers, companies, even freelance journalists.

gazettabyte is only possible, however, due to industry companies agreeing to back the venture, one of them being Finisar. I am grateful to them all.

Q. What are some of the major topics you will focus on first?

RR: To start, components and modules, first in terms of optical integration and then with regard to advances in optical transceivers. Clearly the topics overlap.

Two hot systems’ issues will then follow: architectural changes in the data centre, and high speed transmission issues at 40G, 100Gbps and beyond. The second article will appear prior to OFC 2010.

Q. What major factors do you view as driving the optical communications industry over the next five years?

RR: If I were to list them in order or priority, it is as follows:
• Reducing the cost of bits-per-second-per-kilometer in optical transmission
• How semiconductors is “squeezing the optics out of optical transmission” as an ECOC attendee put it.
• The triumph of optics in short reach interconnects and the rise of silicon photonics
• Manufacturing and the Chinese optical industry: issues such as vertically integrated companies, outsourcing, and the emergence of China with its leading global system vendors Huawei and ZTE as well as transceiver and optical component makers.

Daryl Inniss of Ovum has said how the advent of 40G and 100G marks another industry transition. He wonders whether the latest transition will prove as disruptive as the last one – from 2.5G to 10G back in the late 1990s. This will be answered soon.

If you look at the big trends: advanced modulation schemes are here to stay for high-speed optical transmission, optical access borrowing techniques that until now have been confined to within the network -10G optics, coarse and dense WDM; all are taxing issues that require significant R&D investment.

Then there is the rise of video traffic, mobile data and cloud computing (data centres, high performance computing, optical interconnects down to the CPU) – all core to traditional and ‘new’ service providers’ (Google, Amazon and Yahoo) businesses. Optical communications will play a key role for all these.

How many industries can boast such strong drivers?

Video: 40G Ethernet CFP Transceiver Demonstration

The annual ECOC conference and exhibition was held September 21-23 in Vienna, Austria. Finisar marked its presence this year by showcasing several new technology demonstrations including the industry’s first 40 Gb/s Ethernet CFP transceiver. Something we tried new this year is capturing each of our demos on video directly from the tradeshow floor. If you missed the show, then I am pleased to share with you the video of our 40G Ethernet CFP Transceiver Demonstration.

Watch Video!

Over the next several days, be sure to check back for postings of other Finisar video demonstrations at the show.