Ethernet Alliance Demonstrates Ethernet Multi-Vendor Live Interoperabilty

The Ethernet Alliance, a worldwide group of Ethernet end users, system and component vendors, industry experts and university and government professionals that collaborate for expansion of the Ethernet, has demonstrated a network running 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet traffic, which emerged as a result of joint collaboration among a number of initiatives and members.

Working consistently for steady success of the Ethernet, the organization was established in 2006 with an aim to accelerate the incubation, development, interoperability testing, and support of technologies based or dependent on Ethernet standards. It has been offering support in favor of the IEEE (News - Alert) Std. 802.3baTM-2010 right from the initial stage, and works towards preparing the overall Ethernet industry for adopting the new technologies through demonstration of interoperability and market education. In order to boost the advanced Ethernet technologies, a number of new initiatives have formed within the Ethernet Alliance that receive support from various subcommittees.

The Higher Speed Ethernet subcommittee is led by Dave Schneider (News - Alert) of Ixia, emphasizing the educational materials and interoperability events, the Next Generation Enterprise Cabling subcommittee is led by Brad Booth of AppliedMicro and Frank Yang of CommScope, devising advanced infrastructure that will be needed to build next generation data centers, and the Higher Speed Modular Interconnect subcommittee is led by Greg McSorley from Amphenol that advocates interoperability of high speed optical modules and copper cables.

“Members of the Ethernet Alliance are able to come together to demonstrate the newest of Ethernet technologies while also openly communicating with each other about the trends and directions for the next generation of Ethernet,” commented Brad Booth from Applied Micro, who served as the technical coordinator for the OFC demonstration. “The Ethernet Alliance is a great forum for competitors in the industry to come together to achieve those goals.”

Within the OFC demonstration conducted by the Ethernet Alliance, Ixia XM12 tester and Spirent (News - Alert) TestCenter tester were included to generate 10GbE traffic to the Mellanox top-of-rack switch, which powers the Cisco CRS-3 routers to converge the 10GbE streams into a single 100GbE stream back into the testers. A number of members of the organization participated in the demonstration, such as ADVA Optical Networking, AppliedMicro, Amphenol, Cisco, CommScope, Ixia, Mellanox, NetApp, Opnext, Siemon (News - Alert), Spirent and Tyco Electronics.

In November 2010, nineteen members of the Ethernet Alliance decided to demonstrate their latest technologies and solutions at SC10. The members are Amphenol, Broadcom, Brocade (News - Alert), Chelsio Communications, CommScope, Cisco Systems, Dell, Emulex, Force10 Networks, Fulcrum Microsystems, Intel, Ixia, JDSU, Mellanox, NetApp, Panduit, Spirent and Volex.