HiWire Consortium to be absorbed into Open Compute Project

The HiWire Consortium standardization efforts will be absorbed into a new Interconnects Sub-Project inside the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP). All the Active Electrical Cable Specs were contributed to OCP and can be found on the OCP Contribution Database and the associated products are on display on the OCP Marketplace.

The new Interconnects Sub-Project is led by Don Barnetson, Vice President for AEC Products at Credo. 

As a result of this announcement, OCP will have oversight for the ratified HiWire Specification v1.0, which was originally announced in 2020. The new AEC Project inside OCP will build on this specification by adding additional speeds, capabilities and test specifications as driven by OCP membership.

“The HiWire Consortium leads the inaugural effort to bring standardization to a new category of connectivity products – Active Electrical Cables (AECs),” said Sheng Huang, President of the HiWire Consortium. “As AECs move into the mainstream, we feel the broader umbrella of OCP will continue to accelerate standardization efforts and increase industry adoption.”

“Within the next five years, the 650 Group predicts AECs will take over 75% of server connections and displace chassis in hyperscaler data centers,” said Don Barnetson, Vice President for AEC Products at Credo and the OCP AEC project lead. “Standardization within OCP will further accelerate adoption among the hyperscalers and telecom service provider space.”

"OCP’s members see AECs as a critical technology for their customers which include the world’s largest hyperscalers,” said Steve Helvie, Vice President of Channel Development for OCP. “The Community is excited to continue this standardization work and thanks to the HiWire Consortium for its pioneering effort to bring this revolutionary product to market with such broad industry acceptance. We're also very fortunate to have Credo as a certified OCP Solution Provider showcasing AECs on our OCP Marketplace, providing the Community a more comprehensive set of OCP solutions.

“Active Electrical Cables are key to enabling cloud infrastructure interconnect at the density, scale and ultra-low power required to meet our demands for the coming years,” said Gerald Degrace, Senior Director of Next Gen Technology, Microsoft. “As an active member of both the HiWire Consortium and OCP we’re excited by the synergies of standardizing AECs inside OCP’s broad industry scope.”

https://hiwire.org

Credo ships HiWire Active Electrical Cables

Wednesday, September 04, 2019  Credo, HiWire  

Credo announced the production availability of HiWire Active Electrical Cables (AEC). The company says its AECs provide plug and play, deterministic, persistent in-rack and inter-rack connections at lower cost and lower power of alternative optical approaches. Additionally, the AEC family provides system level, in-cable speedshifting providing seamless connectivity of 50G PAM4 enabled switch ports to widely available 25G NRZ based servers. Credo...

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HiWire aims for standard Active Electrical Cables at 400G and up

Tuesday, September 03, 2019  400G, Standards  

A new HiWire Consortium has been established to pursue the standardization and certification of a new category of Active Electrical Cables (AEC). The group is dedicated to the establishment and ongoing development of an AEC standard that defines a specific implementation of the many industry MSAs and a formal certification process. This will enable an ecosystem of trusted Plug and Play AECs, available from multiple sources, for the hyperscale data...

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Broadcom launches its $61 billion bid for VMware

 Broadcom unveiled plans to acquire all of the outstanding shares of VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction that values VMware at approximately $61 billion, based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022. In addition, Broadcom will assume $8 billion of VMware net debt. The deal has the support of VMware's Board of Directors, along with Michael Dell and Silver Lake, which own 40.2% and 10% of VMware shares outstanding,

The deal would bring together Broadcom's extensive portfolio of networking silicon and software solutions with VMware's leading position in virtualization technology and services. 

Broadcom says the acquisition  will provide enterprise customers an expanded platform of critical infrastructure solutions to accelerate innovation and address the most complex information technology infrastructure needs.

Hock Tan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Broadcom, said, "Building upon our proven track record of successful M&A, this transaction combines our leading semiconductor and infrastructure software businesses with an iconic pioneer and innovator in enterprise software as we reimagine what we can deliver to customers as a leading infrastructure technology company. We look forward to VMware's talented team joining Broadcom, further cultivating a shared culture of innovation and driving even greater value for our combined stakeholders, including both sets of shareholders."

Raghu Raghuram, Chief Executive Officer of VMware, said, "VMware has been reshaping the IT landscape for the past 24 years, helping our customers become digital businesses. We stand for innovation and unwavering support of our customers and their most important business operations and now we are extending our commitment to exceptional service and innovation by becoming the new software platform for Broadcom. Combining our assets and talented team with Broadcom's existing enterprise software portfolio, all housed under the VMware brand, creates a remarkable enterprise software player. Collectively, we will deliver even more choice, value and innovation to customers, enabling them to thrive in this increasingly complex multi-cloud era."

Michael Dell, Chairman of the VMware Board, said, "Together with Broadcom, VMware will be even better positioned to deliver valuable, innovative solutions to even more of the world's largest enterprises. This is a landmark moment for VMware and provides our shareholders and employees with the opportunity to participate in meaningful upside."

A Broadcom investor presentation is online.

https://investors.broadcom.com/static-files/232c0cd2-02d9-4704-bb7b-5659cef67fae

VMware completes spin-Off from Dell Technologies

Monday, November 01, 2021  Dell, Vmware  

VMware completed its spin-off from Dell Technologies. The move provides VMware increased freedom to execute its multi-cloud strategy, a simplified capital structure and governance model, and additional operational and financial flexibility. VMware and Dell said they will continue to partner with each other and to continue support/services to mutual customers.“VMware’s mission is to deliver the trusted software foundation that accelerates our customers’...

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Meta selects Azure as strategic cloud provider for AI research

Meta has selected Azure as a strategic cloud provider to help accelerate AI research and development. 

Specifically, Meta will utilize a dedicated Azure cluster of 5400 GPUs using the latest virtual machine (VM) series in Azure (NDm A100 v4 series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs) for some of their large-scale AI research workloads.

In addition, the companies agreed to collaborate to scale PyTorch adoption on Azure. 

“We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Azure to advance Meta’s AI research, innovation, and open-source efforts in a way that benefits more developers around the world,” Jerome Pesenti, Vice President of AI, Meta. “With Azure’s compute power and 1.6 TB/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM we are able to accelerate our ever-growing training demands to better accommodate larger and more innovative AI models. Additionally, we’re happy to work with Microsoft in extending our experience to their customers using PyTorch in their journey from research to production.”

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/meta-selects-azure-as-strategic-cloud-provider-to-advance-ai-innovation-and-deepen-pytorch-collaboration/

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Broadband Forum kick off App-Enabled Services Gateway project

The Broadband Forum has launched an app-enabled services gateway project to help service providers deploy, activate and manage third party applications such as parental controls, Wi-Fi analytics, streaming services and security solutions to consumers on a centralized Internet gateway device or other Customer Premises Equipment (CPE). 

Broadband Forum’s WT-492 ‘Software-Based Architecture for the App-Enabled Services Gateway - Design Principles’ aims to enable an ecosystem for the end-user network. This also presents an opportunity for “app-store-like” or “install on-demand” functionality for end-user services, deployment of secure and trustworthy applications, and the formation of adaptable and powerful platforms to support new and innovative cloud services.

The Broadband Forum envisions that app-enabled services gateways could, for example, monitor and troubleshoot regimens that support unloading bad applications and isolating bad network devices to protect the end-user when needed.

“Service providers’ customers have confronted them with unprecedented demand on their networks and app-enabled services gateways will help unlock a plethora of third-party applications and services,” said Jason Walls, of QA Cafe, Chair of the Broadband Forum Connected Home Council and BUS Work Area Director. “Our work pulls together industry leaders from multiple Standards Development Organizations and the open-source community to create quality, interoperable, open standards. The adoption of faster access technologies and resulting exponential growth in bandwidth opens up new ARPU opportunities for service providers to capitalize on.”

https://www.broadband-forum.org/2022-06-26-broadband-forum-launches-app-enabled-service-gateway-project-to-revolutionize-service-providers-business-plans

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Broadcom's Q2 revenue rises 23% yoy to $8.1 billion

Citing strong sales in networking and server storage segments, Broadcom reported revenue of $8.103 billion for its second quarter of fiscal year 2022, ended May 1, 2022, up 23% over the same period last year. Net income increased to $2.590 billion, compared to $1.493 billion a year ago.

"Broadcom's second quarter revenue accelerated sequentially, and was driven by strength in networking and server storage," said Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom Inc. "We expect this momentum to continue into the third quarter."

"Consolidated revenue grew 23% year-over-year to a record $8.1 billion and operating profit increased 30%," said Kirsten Spears, CFO of Broadcom Inc. "We generated $4.2 billion in free cash flow and are expecting free cash flow to remain strong in the third quarter. Consistent with our commitment to return excess cash to shareholders, we returned $4.5 billion to shareholders in the quarter including $1.7 billion of cash dividends and $2.8 billion of share repurchases."

https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/broadcom-inc-announces-second-quarter-fiscal-year-2022-financial

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Marvell posts sales of $1.447 billion

 Marvell reported net revenue of $1.447 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023. The result exceeded the midpoint of the company's guidance provided on March 3, 2022. GAAP net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2023 was $(166) million, or $(0.20) per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2023 was $448 million, or $0.52 per diluted share. Cash flow from operations for the first quarter was $194.8 million.

"We had a strong start to fiscal 2023, delivering record first quarter revenue of $1.45 billion, which grew 8 percent sequentially and 74 percent year over year. Revenue exceeded the midpoint of guidance, driven by higher-than-forecasted results from the datacenter end market. Our new product ramps and growth in content have been instrumental in driving strong revenue growth," said Matt Murphy, Marvell's President and CEO. "We are guiding for growth to continue in the second quarter, projecting revenue at the midpoint to grow 5 percent sequentially and 41 percent year over year. With 88 percent of our overall revenue derived from data infrastructure, we are confident that our unique secular growth drivers in cloud, 5G, and auto, will continue to help drive sustainable long-term growth."

https://investor.marvell.com/quarterly-results

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Webinar replay: Solving the interconnect density bottleneck in 51.2T switch

https://youtu.be/ggaOx2qs5gs

Webinar replay - first presented on 04-May-2022

With the first generation of 51.2T switches running at 100 Gbps per lane on the horizon, the market will soon be considering the pros and cons of different board design choices for managing so many high capacity channels.  Will co-packaged optics (CPO) or near-packaged optics (NPO) scale to meet the bandwidth density challenge?

In this one-hour webinar, we hear from Dr. Rebecca K. Schaevitz, a Board Member of COBO and a Principal Engineer and Product Line Manager at Broadcom . 

We then hear from Tom Mitcheltree, Advanced Technology Manager at US Conec, a supplier of connector embodiment packages based on standardized and custom optical interconnect ferrules.  

This is the 10th in a series of webinars presented by COBO, the Consortium for On-board Optics, and sponsored by DuPont’s Silicon Valley Technology Center.

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Video: Simplifying Connectivity at Cloud Scale - Prosimo

https://youtu.be/oT6fNlB1Kj4

Enterprises, including major financial institutions, have been struggling to provide connectivity at cloud scale for all of their application workloads, says Faraz Siddiqui, Head of Solutions Architecture, Prosimo.

Filmed at ONUG Spring 2022.

https://prosimo.io

Who is Prosimo? CTO presentation

Tuesday, April 06, 2021  Prosimo, SD-WAN, Start-Ups  

https://youtu.be/58YMebmBJwMProsimo, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California,  has launched its Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform for ensuring secure application experiences across multi-cloud environments.In this 40-minute presentation, Nehal Bhau, Co-founder & CTO, Prosimo, shares his insights on the SD-WAN market, Prosimo's vertically integrated stack and its method to leverage the global infrastructure of the top...

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