Broadband Vision_"crying need for infrastructure vision,"
(05/11/00, 4:10 p.m. ET) By Stuart Glascock, TechWeb News
LAS VEGAS -- Citing a "crying need for infrastructure vision," Extreme Networks CEO Gordon Stitt said Thursday that a new breed of broadband infrastructure will within a year be deployed in large trials at less cost than widely used SONET systems.
"SONET is going to fail," Stitt said in his keynote address at Networld+Interop 2000. "Broadband actually changes the way
you look at the world. It is not a thing, but an experience. Today, we are on the verge of 10 gigabit being a reality."
Stitt said the new broadband infrastructure will be the service-provisioning platform for the next several years. It will combine
the guaranteed latency and carrier-class reliability of SONET with the data capacity of Ethernet.
Stitt also predicted that eventually Ethernet will be "everywhere," replacing not only SONET but also ATM, token ring, and
FDDI, technologies he said are too complex and do not scale.
"Ethernet is going to continue to scale; 10-Gbit/s Ethernet is coming soon and 100-Gbit/s is coming soon after that," Stitt
said. "Connections will be so fast, they'll make you're eyes swim."
"He was dead-on" about the explosive growth of Ethernet, said Spero Koulouras, CEO of FiberCycle Networks, Los
Gatos, Calif. "In Asia, where they're building the infrastructure from the ground up, they're ahead of the U.S. There will be
10-Gbit/s Ethernet into homes in Beijing before Silicon Valley."
Extreme (stock: EXTR) makes multilayer network switching products that boast quality-of-service and prioritization features.
Among its current offerings is the BlackDiamond 6808, a chassis-based gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switch. The Dell'Oro
Group, Portola Valley, Calif., estimates the Layer 3 switching market could grow to $4 billion by next year.
The company announced at N+I a suite of ExtremeWare capabilities for its "I" and Summit series and BlackDiamond
switches. The new capabilities include wire-speed Web cache redirection, server load balancing, and two-way traffic
shaping, according to Extreme, Santa Clara, Calif. |
