Blue, I'm glad you asked, because up until now I'd not seen their product descriptions, primarily because they weren't saying much until recently. Your question prompted me to go to their web site where Corvis does now, in fact, have some high level descriptions of their offerings:
corvis.com
But from what I can tell, they still aren't saying much about what lies inside those boxes.
Conspicuous to me is their *not* mentioning or showing any signs of Fibre Channel (with som much to do lately with storage transport) or GbE/10GbE on their gateway device. This is understandable, I suppose, because from what I can tell Corvis is primarily marketing their wares to long haul carriers, and FC and BGE are still very much considered LAN/MAN protocols. But I suspect that they will need to address these two product groups before long. Just my guess.
Their claim about not requiring "electrical regeneration" is very carefully stated, and it now makes more sense to me after seeing the schematics and reading where Corvis will be marketing their own "optical amplifiers" which will be spaced at intervals along optical spans. The distinction between amplifier and regenerator is significant, however. In amplifying, they do not require "back to back" signaling conversion (optical to electrical, and then electrical back to optical) often represented as o-e/e-o, which would be typical in support of signal retiming, reshaping and regeneration. In short, regeneration.
Instead, they do signal "amplification" for greater distances. Which simply means that they "boost" the level of the optical signal through an optical amplifiers for, what they claim to be, distances of up to 3200 km.
They don't have too much detail on what the spacing requirements are between amplifiers, though. In general, the introduction of amplifiers on spans that are 3200 km in length does dispel some earlier notions that I had about this point.
I think I'll wait and see what their specs call for before commenting further. In fact, there is a great deal more that I'd like to see concerning the insides of each of their network elements.
FAC |
