APRIL 11, 2001 Corvis Unveils Grooming Switch
Corvis Corp. (Nasdaq: CORV - message board) has
unveiled preliminary details of its next big development in
optical networking – a grooming switch that will compete
head to head with the CoreDirector from its arch-rival,
Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN - message board).
The new switch has been under development since last
summer when Corvis acquired Baylight Networks, a small
startup designing optical network access systems and
subsystems, says David Smith, vice president of hardware
engineering (see Corvis Completes Baylight Acquisition ).
The product, which is expected to go into alpha testing by
the end of the year, is far enough along that Corvis has
now leased a 88,000 square foot research and
development space for it in Columbia, Maryland.
“The engineers have been sharing space for a long time,”
says Smith. “And they’ve been busting for their own
space. Now that they’re getting closer to having
something, they can’t continue to share a lab anymore.”
Corvis’s new switch extends the company’s existing
product range, which furnishes all-optical long-haul
backbones. “We’re well aware that you can’t just stop at
the core,” says Smith. The new switch will have an
electrical rather than an optical core and will give service
providers a way of feeding traffic on and off their optical
backbones at the sort of bandwidths they want – multiples
of STS1 (51.8 Mbit/s) channels.
Ciena was first to market with a switch capable of
grooming STS1s in this way. It’s already shipping a
version of its CoreDirector with 256 x 256 ports, each
operating at OC-48 (2.5 Gbit/s). And it’s announced a
64x64 switch operating at OC-192 (10 Gbit/s).
Corvis says that it can top that. “Our switch is going to
big,” says Smith. “I can’t tell you specifics, but let’s just
say big. “
He claims that the new switch will be able to scale to 512
x 512 ports. But he cautions that higher port counts may
not be what customers need.
“I’m not sure that 512 ports running at OC192 are really
necessary,” he says. “Our switch will be able to do that,
absolutely. But no one is suggesting today that one feeder
point could generate enough traffic to need that kind of
capacity. I’m sure it could happen eventually, but things
could be very different then.”
Corvis also plans to match CoreDirector on granularity.
Like CoreDirector, the new Corvis switch will also be able
to groom STS1 channels, says Smith. This has been a big
sticking point for carriers who want finer grain control
than they can get with other boxes from Sycamore
Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: SCMR - message board) and
Tellium Inc., which only go down to OC 48.
Smith agrees that granularity is an important aspect of any
edge switch. “It’s really essential for any edge switch
these days,” he says. He also says that Corvis’s version
will be able to aggregate or concatonate STS1 traffic so
that carriers can group channels together as one big pipe.
Of course, it’s one thing to talk about upstaging Ciena’s
CoreDirector and it’s another thing to actually do it.
Developing ASICs (application specific integrated circuits)
for such big grooming switches is said to push the limits
on semiconductor technology. And right now, Corvis
hasn’t got the ASICs back from the foundry to know
whether they work.
By the time Corvis ships its switch, the market also could
be quite crowded. Semiconductor vendors are developing
off-the-shelf ASICs for STS1 grooming switches (see Velio
Breaks Grooming Barrier ) – and when these arrive, other
system vendors are likely to jump on the bandwagon. The
first among them could be Sycamore, which is already
talking about a 512x512 switch capable of STS1
grooming. Startup BrightLink Networks Inc. has plans for
an even bigger grooming switch based on a novel
distributed architecture (see Brightlink Works on Its
Grooming ).
Financial analysts question whether Corvis has got deep
enough pockets to see all of its product plans through to
fruition. With over 1400 employees, five facilities, and two
year’s worth of inventory the company may have a tough
time keeping up if the current market conditions continue,
they say.
In the quarter ending in September 2000 Corvis raised
$1.1 billion in financing, but burned about $185 million.
Figures aren’t yet available for the following quarter.
“Two hundred million is clearly a lot of money,” says
Max Schuetz, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners.
“You look around and everyone else is laying people off,
and Corvis hasn’t made a big effort to cut costs. Either
they have some big contracts that are imminent, or they
are a bit more optimistic than we are about the length of
this downturn.”
-- Marguerite Reardon, senior editor, Light Reading
lightreading.com
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