Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! (Observations from ISC ’09)

Whenever there’s an accession of a new monarch, you’re likely to hear the crowd chanting this proclamation. And after spending a few days walking the show floor at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’09) in Hamburg, Germany, I have to admit that there were times when I couldn’t get this phrase out of my head specifically as it relates to InfiniBand DDR (Dual Data Rate). Clearly, there’s a new sheriff in town in the form of QDR (Quad Data Rate). Let me explain.

Wherever I looked, I saw QDR equipment. Sun, Voltaire, Mellanox, QLogic and Intel all showed their latest QDR switches and HCAs. Mellanox connected the entire show floor with a QDR switch/HCA demo network utilizing 100 meters of active optical cables (AOC) from Finisar and others. Voltaire and Sun both demonstrated their QDR switches incorporating high speed ports utilizing a new connector, currently standardized in the InfiniBand Trade Association, capable of transmitting data at rates of up to 120Gbps. To support this new CXP connector, Finisar has launched its C.wire™ AOC, demonstrating 150Gbps data transmission over a parallel optical fiber cable. C.wire is a 12×12.5Gb/s (or 150Gb/s) parallel AOC which has attracted lots of attention on the show floor, particularly from those who have dealt with bulky copper cables at DDR data rates. Listening to OEM suppliers, integrators and HPC end-users at the show, it seems that the conversion from DDR to QDR is going to happen quickly, with some saying that they expect the port volume cross-over to occur around Q4 2009.

All in all, ISC ’09 proved to be a great show in an exciting new market for Finisar, as more and more HPC users realize that a fire hydrant cannot be operated without a hose.

auf Wiedersehen, Hamburg – see you next year at ISC ’10.

Welcome to the Family, C.wire!

Our active optical cable family, that is. Those of you who have been following the developments in this product line already know about Laserwire, our serial 10Gb/s cable and Quadwire, our parallel 40Gp/s cable offering. Today, at ISC ’09 in Germany, we unveiled C.wire, the industry’s first 150 Gbps parallel active optical cable for supercomputing and data center networking applications.

C.wire is based on the CXP form factor and uses fiber optic technology to transmit parallel high-speed data in 100G+ applications, such as Infiniband, 100G Ethernet and other proprietary high-speed interconnections. If you’re at ISC this week, you can stop by the Finisar booth #612 to see C.wire in action.

In other ISC ’09 demo news, Finisar will also be taking part in a 40Gb/s ecosystem demonstration alongside other leading vendors such as Voltaire, Intel and Sun Microsystems. Led by adapter and switch solution provider Mellanox, this demonstration is meant to highlight the capabilities of today’s latest high performance computing technologies.

More to come from ISC shortly.

Spreken zie Supercomputing?

Next week, Finisar heads to Hamburg, Germany for the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Europe’s premier high performance computing event, taking place June 23rd – 26th. As the region’s leading conference dedicated to all things supercomputing, this year’s event will cover a range of topics, including cloud computing and high performance computing in aeronautics research and bioinformatics. In addition, there will be keynotes that are sure to inspire and spark discussion.

We’ll be there at Booth #612 showcasing our active optical cable family and demonstrating how they can optimize supercomputing applications. If you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by. We look forward to seeing you there.

Stay tuned for more on ISC next week.

Finisar at Interop Las Vegas

Next week, Finisar will be heading to Las Vegas for Interop 2009. From the looks of the conference agenda, this year’s show is shaping up to be a good one.

We’ll be there, showcasing our active optical cable line and talking about how these interconnects can help reduce energy consumption and take the heat out of datacenters. We’ll also be checking out some panels and have our ears tuned for the latest trends in networking.

If you’re going to be in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by the Finisar booth (#2612) and say hi. In fact, the first 25 visitors who mention this blog will get a snazzy Quadwire car.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Active Optical Cables and the truce between Optics and Copper

This week’s guest blogger is Jan Meise. Jan is responsible for Strategic Marketing at Finisar and his work in strategic marketing allows him to bring a very interesting perspective to some of the new trends in active optical cables. I’m hoping Jan will be a regular guest blogger on the site.
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Almost out of nowhere and with little time for everyone to digest, a new market segment emerged in mid-2007 in the optical component industry called Active Optical Cables (AOCs).

Put simply, an AOC has an electrical interface at both ends. The electrical to optical conversion is embedded into the cable wire harness and uses fiber optics cables as the transport medium.

And so new is the Active Optical Cable segment that analysts are still struggling to build a consensus forecast. While Lightcounting is estimating a 2010 AOC market of some $14m, IGI is two logarithmic steps more aggressive and sees potential for $1.1bn revenue in the same year.

Beyond revenue expectations, Active Optical Cables have the great potential to end the war between Optics and Copper. As Karen Liu of Ovum outlined in her article, there will be ‘universal ports’ for copper and optics allowing both to ‘help the total market’ as synergistic “frenemies”.

In this new post war era, systems are thereby using common host connectors enabling Data Center customers to deploy copper and/or active optical cables based on needed cable lengths and diameters, bend radii and of course, cost.

By moving the signal conditioning chips from the host board into the cable ends, electrical interfaces on the host board can be simplified, ultimately keeping the overall system cost and power need to a minimum.

Being able to choose among passive copper, active copper and active optical cables, end-users pay and consume power only according to their specific need.

While first concepts of Active Optical Cables were originally developed in the 1990s, the commercialization of those cables started in 2007 with products for InfiniBand, 10GbE, DVI and HDMI applications.

Finisar introduced its first two families of Active Optical Cables, Laserwire™ and Quadwire™ in 2007 and 2008, respectively. While currently mostly focused on 10GbE and InfiniBand, we have seen adjacent markets for those families all the way from industrial to consumer applications.

In subsequent posts I will take a closer look at those various markets but, in the meantime, you can check out the product briefs for Laserwire and Quadwire.

I invite your comments on Active Optical Cable technology, or even better, give me your best shot for the AOC 2010 revenue forecast! You can also follow me on Twitter.

I will be demonstrating Finisar’s cable products at Interop next week. If you would like to chat in person come by the Finisar booth #2612 anytime.