Sigma Designs Aligns Around Media Processing and Home Connectivity

Sigma Designs announced a major reorganization of the company around two strategic business groups -- the Media Processor Business Group and the Home Connectivity Business Group -- as well as a Worldwide Sales Group.


The reorganization follows a number of strategic acquisitions, including the VXP video processing business, the Z-Wave home control/smart energy business, and most recently, the CopperGate entertainment networking business.


Currently, Sigma has over 500 employees working in 10 countries and is a key technology provider for most of the industry's largest set-top box manufacturers, consumer electronics companies, and more than 40 service
providers around the world.


As a result of this reorganization, Sigma is establishing the following major new groups.


Media Processor Business Group: Headed by David Lynch as Vice President and General Manager (formerly Vice President of Sales & Marketing), this group will have the mission of developing and marketing a wide range of system-on-chip solutions for the set-top box, consumer electronics, and home control markets. The Media Processor Business Group moves forward as the leading provider of IPTV set-top box solutions, DMA solutions, and Z-Wave home control/smart energy solutions along with an emerging position in the IP cable set-top box market and other key initiatives.


Home Connectivity Business Group: Headed by Gabi Hilevitz as Vice President and General Manager (formerly CEO of CopperGate), this group will have the mission of developing and marketing industry-leading home entertainment connectivity solutions for residential gateways, set-top boxes, optical network terminals (ONTs), bridges, consumer electronic equipment, and MDU broadband access devices. Sigma's Home Connectivity Business Group represents the leading provider of IPTV home connectivity solutions over coax and phone lines, a leading player in Ethernet-over-Coax (EoC) solutions for MDUs and an emerging player in the HomePlug AV and G.hn segments.


Worldwide Sales Group: Headed by Sal Cobar as Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development (formerly Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Silicon Image). This new unified sales group will have the mission to take all products to the market through direct sales, distribution partners, and business development teams. By integrating sales and business development into one centralized organization, this group
will improve cross selling, strengthen Sigma's relationships with key accounts globally and begin promoting integrated solutions.


Additionally, the company has established a new Corporate Development Department, headed by David Baum (formerly VP Worldwide Marketing for CopperGate and its co-founder). This department will handle all Corporate Marketing functions and will help drive the overall evolution of the company and establish a coherent strategy that unifies all business groups. The new structure maintains the existing organizations for Finance, Operations, and Strategic Marketing while streamlining processes across the various business units.
http://www.sigmadesigns.com

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Teranetics Announces 40nm Quad 10GBASE-T PHY

Teranetics, a start-up based in San Jose, California, introduced its third generation of 10GBASE-T PHYs implemented in 40nm technology. The small form factor and low power dissipation of the 40nm chips enable 10 GigE copper connections in high-density data center switches. They also pave for 10 GigE LAN-on-motherboard servers.

The Teranetics TN8044 is a quad-port 10GBASE-T PHY device designed for high-density, highly power efficient 10 GigE switches. The TN8022 (dual-port) and TN8020 (single-port) offer the power-efficiency required to enable 10GBASE-T adapter card designs.


Teranetics' new TN8000 family dissipates less than 4 watts per port at a full 100 meters, and as little as 2 watts per port in short reach mode. In addition, this third-generation, 40nm family continues Teranetics' support for triple rate Ethernet (100M/1G/10G). It will also offer support for the emerging Energy Efficient
Ethernet standard (EEE, or IEEE 802.3az). Teranetics CTO and Chairman Sanjay Kasturia is the Editor in chief for the IEEE 802.3az committee developing the EEE standard.


Teranetics noted that its technology further reduces the external component count required to build systems with 10GBASE-T ports. The TN8000 family allows multiple PHYs to share reference clocks and power regulators, and also integrates an EMI filter that previously was built with external components on the PC board. Moreover, MDI
test capabilities reduce manufacturing costs by increasing equipment manufacturers' final yield and decreasing test time.
http://www.teranetics.com

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Telenor to Deploy Telcordia Next Generation OSS

Telenor has selected Telcordia's Next Generation Operations Support Systems (NGOSS) to support the replacement and operation of its entire mobile broadband services infrastructure, spanning 2G, 3G/UMTS and 4G/LTE technologies in Norway. The program is Telenor's largest-ever upgrade of its mobile network.


In November 2009, Telenor announced a six-year program to replace its entire mobile services infrastructure in Norway with equipment provided by Huawei and Starent Networks.
http://www.telcordia.com
http://www.telenor.com

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Savvis Offers Latency Monitoring Tools for Financial Customers

Savvis will begin providing enhanced latency and connectivity monitoring capabilities for its financial services clients across the globe. Specifically, Savvis will be able to proactively monitor, troubleshoot and maintain the high-performance and low-latency of exchange and liquidity venue connectivity within its data centers and its integrated global network. As part of this effort, Savvis will be taking advantage of Corvil's latency management for electronic trading and market data.

CorvilClear will share latency information across Savvis' financial network and can provide data to all customers via the SavvisStation portal. CorvilClear will also monitor the latency and quality of hundreds of market data feeds delivered from venues to customers in Savvis data centers, as well as customer sites.

Savvis offers secure, high-availability, direct connectivity to hundreds of exchange feeds and other execution venues around the world, such as BATS Global Markets, NASDAQ and the London Stock Exchange.
http://www.savvis.net/financialhttp://

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HP Launches its Networking Portfolio

Following its recent acquisition of 3Com, HP unveiled its edge-to-core networking portfolio that combines key elements of the HP ProCurve and 3Com line, along with TippingPoint security products. The portfolio is a cornerstone of the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy, which eliminates silos of servers, storage and networking to create virtual pools of resources designed to optimally run business services.


HP Networking said its product line-up allows customers to eliminate redundant equipment by integrating wired and wireless environments with security from the edge to core. The company will also feature a "single pane of glass" management to configure, deploy and monitor the network. This enables common policy management, reduces human error and creates a consistent user experience across access mediums.


The new portfolio consists of four product families that address specific client requirements from the branch to data center. These solutions are supported by HP Services and sold through HP and 40,000 specialized channel partners.


The company also cited its more than 5,000 network infrastructure and voice professionals worldwide as a key differentiator, enabling it to provide a full life cycle of Networking Services.


HP's newest internal data center will run completely on HP networking products.


HP Networking will be led by Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager, and is part of the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking business unit led by David Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager.
http://www.hp.com

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New InfiniBand RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Spec for the Data Center

The InfiniBand Trade Association has released a new specification called RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), pronounced "Rocky", for bringing the power of the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) I/O architecture to Ethernet-based business solutions. Products based on RoCE will reach the market during the coming year.


RDMA and low latency clustering has dominated the high performance computing space. Low latency and RDMA capabilities in data center fabrics enable end-users to achieve significantly higher and deterministic transaction rates while increasing the efficiency of clustered servers and storage systems and reducing energy consumption.


The new RoCO spec defines a "one fat pipe" approach to server I/O and gives the user great flexibility in deploying applications. RoCE is implemented in and downloadable today in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.5.1. Many Linux distributions, which include OFED, support a wide and rich range of middleware and application solutions such as IPC, sockets, messaging, virtualization, SAN, NAS, file systems and databases. RoCE can therefore deliver all three dimensions of unified networking on Ethernet -- IPC, NAS and SAN.
http://www.infinibandta.org

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PMC-Sierra Enables Wireless Backhaul with GigE over OTN

PMC-Sierra introduced a reference design for its HyPHY chipset that supports standards-based transport of Ethernet-based services over OTN. ITU-T G.709 Amendment 3 specifies direct mapping of Gigabit Ethernet (GE) to the OTN layer by defining a new container for the smallest Optical Data Unit (ODU), ODU0 (1.238 Gbit/s), ensuring complete timing transparency and bandwidth efficiency of Ethernet-based client signals.


In conjunction with HyPHY's innovative support for timing synchronization over packet services, the reference design enables cost-optimized Layer 1 OTN networks with full support for Ethernet network timing distribution, a critical requirement for wireless backhaul applications.


PMC-Sierra's HyPHY chipset integrates support for mapping and multiplexing of GEs into sub-ODU1 (2.488Gbit/s) containers. The new PM5423-KIT ODU0 reference design leverages HyPHY's flexible packet interfaces and unique OTN Payload Tributary Mapping (OPTM) technology to add support for the newly defined OTN mapping modes, including:

• Transparent GE mapping and de-mapping into/from ODU0 via GMP; and


• ITU-T ODU0 multiplexing and de-multiplexing into/from higher order ODUks.

PMC-Sierra's HyPHY 20G delivers high capacity framing, mapping and multiplexing of Carrier Ethernet, SAN, OTN, transparent bit services such as video, and SONET/SDH to allow Carriers to reduce the number of network elements, while incrementally adding bandwidth or changing service mix per node without forklift upgrades. The platform provides client-agnostic, rate-agile Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) and 10 Gigabit pluggable (XFP or SFP+) interfaces and a set of flexible system interfaces for networking to a variety of switch fabric architectures. HyPHY 10G provides a lower density option for optical platforms.
http://www.pmc-sierra.com/networking

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Force10 Networks Readies 40 GbE for Data Centers

Force10 Networks plans to incorporate 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40 GbE) into its switch/router solutions for dynamic data centers. Initially, Force10 plans to incorporate 40 GbE into a 10 GbE top-of-rack access switch for converging Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. The company's E-Series core switch/router is already 40/100 GbE-ready, and its C-Series of resilient chassis-based switches are 40 GbE-ready.



Force10 anticipates that economic considerations will drive the deployment of 40 GbE in the data center. The company predicts that while future market factors will eventually reduce the cost of 100 GbE technology, the price point of 40 GbE will more cost effectively keep pace with the requirements for more bandwidth at the server edge, as well for higher capacity interconnects in the data center core.


Ratification of the 40 GbE standard by the IEEE is currently pending.
http://www.force10networks.com

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Fusion-io Raises $45 Million for Next Gen Flash Memory

Fusion-io, a start-up based in Salt Lake City, Utah, raised approximately $45 million in a Series C funding for its new flash-based solid-state memory.


Fusion-io's solid-state storage technology aims to close the gap between processing power and storage needs at a lower cost than traditional disc-based storage. The company's ioDrive integrates with servers at the system bus and kernel level, creating a new Flash memory tier. It easily outperforms SSDs and currently scales to 320 GB.


The funding was led by new investor, Meritech Capital Partners. Also participating in the round were new investors, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Triangle Peak Partners, as well as returning investors, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.
http://www.fusionio.com/

• Steve Wozniak serves as Fusion-io's Chief Scientist.

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Arista -- The Big Idea in Data Center Switching

http://www.aristanetworks.com

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Arista Packs 384 L2/L3 10GbE ports in Data Center Switch

Arista Networks, a start-up based in Menlo Park, California, introduced its new flagship switching platform boasting 10 terabits per second of switching capacity and up to 384 wirespeed L2/L3 10GbE ports in one-quarter of a rack. The Arista 7500, which is designed for cloud computing, virtualization, and high-performance data centers, is five times faster and one-tenth the power draw per wirespeed port of other modular data center switches, according to the company.


The Arista 7500 features a modular design and leverages off-the-shelf Ethernet switching silicon. It uses the company's Extensible Operating System -- EOS -- that features a unique multi-process, state sharing architecture, with open access to Linux tools and extensible network services. EOS provides a single binary image across all Arista networking platforms and delivers mission-critical data center features such as Stateful Fault Repair and In-Service Software Upgrades.


Performance specification on the Arista 7500 include a L2/L3 throughput of 5.7 billion packets per second -- enough to deliver 40 and 100Gbps Ethernet interfaces in the future. A distributed, non-blocking fabric and mid-plane architecture enables low-latency traffic to be carried without loss and manages congestion under the most demanding workloads. The company calculates that its switch uses 1/10th the power per wirespeed 10GbE port, enabling it to use 90% less power that current technology. It also features front-to-rear airflow for new data center heat efficiency requirements.


The Arista 7500 scales linearly with each fabric module and is designed for the efficient forwarding of unicast and multicast traffic. Packet buffering has been boosted to 18 GB, which is more that double its nearest competitor. These capabilities enable data center consolidation, improve the performance of virtualized servers, deliver the performance needed for cloud computing, and lower the power draw of any network, thus reducing operating costs and improving the efficiency of the overall IT infrastructure.


The Arista 7500 Series starts at $140,000 with a price per 10GbE port of approximately $1200, depending on configuration. The platform is already in service in several mission-critical networks.
http://www.aristanetworks.com

• In May 2009, Arista Networks introduced its high density 10GBASE-T switches in a 1U form factor. The Arista 7100T layer 2/3 switches include 24 and 48-port models. Each model offers auto-negotiating 1/10GBASE-T ports with standard RJ-45 connectors and SFP+ uplink ports. The Arista 7100T switches support 10GBASE-T over Category 6a cabling up to 100m, but also support Category 5e and Category 6 cabling with distances up to 55m. This allows for investment protection with existing cabling plants.



• Arista Networks is headed by Jayshree Ullal (President and CEO), who was previously Senior Vice President of Cisco Systems, responsible for the company's Datacenter, Switching and Services Group. The company was founded by Andreas Bechtolsheim, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who was also a Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and a Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for the Systems Group at Sun. From 1996 to 2003, Andy was Vice President and General Manager of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco Systems.

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