US chipmaker Marvell Technology has created 400Gbps silicon for Ethernet switches, destined for data centres that live at the edge of the network. The shiny new Prestera CX 8500 family supports 32 ports of 400Gbps or 256 ports of 50Gbps – that's up to 12.8Tb per second of total bandwidth. The chips integrate two technologies …

Juniper Networks this week pulled the covers off the latest in its Contrail range, a carrier edge product called Contrail Edge Cloud. The Gin Palace said the software targets applications like base stations, hub sites, and switching sites. Integration with Red Hat's OpenStack IaaS platform allows Contrail Edge Cloud to run …

Microsoft has said it'll be bringing more "software-defined" capabilities to Windows Server in 2019. It would have been easy to have missed it, though: Redmond didn't offer a product release, it buried the story at seventh place in a "top-10 networking features in Windows Server 2019" list, here. Greg Cusanza and Schumann Ge …

Lightbits Labs and Solarflare are promoting the idea of NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) using TCP-over-bog-standard Ethernet, instead of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) via data centre-class Ethernet, iWARP, InfiniBand or Fibre Channel. Solarflare claims NVMe-over-TCP using Ethernet provides IT departments with the same high …

The next round of bonkers-fast upgrades to data center networks is going to be 400Gbps Ethernet – and Juniper Networks has joined the party with a suitable roadmap. This year has been something of a Year Of 400 Gbps Announcements, with Arista saying in February it expects trial deployments of its 400Gbps kit to start next year …

High-speed Ethernet biz Mellanox has posted record revenues for the second quarter of fiscal year 2018, driven in part by Dell EMC and HPE's seeming insatiable appetite for Ethernet switches. Sales for Q2 ended 30 June was up by 26.7 per cent to $268.4m, which chief exec Eyal Waldman put down to its "25 gigabit per second and …

The router market is stagnating worldwide, but nobody's told Australian buyers. Analyst firm IDC, which in June gave us the drear news that global router sales fell 1.4 per cent between Q1 2017 and Q1 2018, reckons Australian customers like their packet-processing big iron: its Asia-Pacific Quarterly Router Tracker released …

Arista Networks has decided the campus network is the next place it wants to irritate Cisco. The company this week unveiled two campus-scale switches in its Spline range – the 7300X3 and 7050X3, which expand its footprint in the important 100 Gbps Ethernet space. In announcing the company's first quarter results recently, CEO …

If you watch the fortunes of the big names in switching, you probably won't be surprised to hear that the market is only recording modest growth. According to analyst clan IDC's wrap of calendar year 2017's shipments, the switch business added a mere 3.2 per cent year-on-year in Q4 2017 to reach US$6.9 billion for the quarter …

Marvell Semiconductor is off and running with 802.3cd-compliant chips, and reckons it's the first sand-baker to ship to the standard. The IEEE's 802.3cd standard defines the physical ports for current and future high-speed Ethernet interfaces – the 50 Gbps, 200 Gbps and 400 Gbps rates expected over time to replace 25 Gbps and …

In the seven weeks since The Register broke the news of the Meltdown/Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities, nearly every corner of the industry has scrambled to patch, re-patch, and work out how to Spectre-proof the world. Except for Ethernet switch vendors, who with a very few exceptions haven't even troubled to make …

Just as we're getting used to 40Gbps, Ethernet networking kit-flinger Mellanox makes it 10 times faster with a Spectrum-2 ASIC running at up to 400Gbps. It's doing this because of our old friend incessant data growth. Specific drivers mentioned by Mellanox include AI, real-time analytics, NVMe over fabrics storage array access …

BT has been ordered to dig into its pocket and pay rivals £22m in interest following its overcharged for its backhaul ethernet services between 2006-2011. In December 2012, BT was ordered to pay Cable & Wireless Worldwide (now Vodafone), Sky, TalkTalk, Verizon and Virgin £95m after it was found to have overcharged its British …

UpdatedBT has been smacked with a £42m penalty for its failure via Openreach to compensate other telecoms providers for delays to fixing leased line "Ethernet" services, in a decision from Ofcom today. As a result of the investigation, BT said it estimates it will pay an additional £300m in compensation to the affected communications …

Sysadmin BlogThe 25 and 50Gb switching standards have finally been ratified. Switches from various manufacturers have been available for some time, but now there's a better than average chance they'll interoperate with one another. While more speed is generally good, the 25 and 50Gb standards will complicate things for data centre …

There's already product a-plenty on the market, but it still matters that the Google-led 25G Ethernet consortium has formalised the release of its technical specification. It follows the publication of the final report from last August's 25G/50G Ethernet plugfest. The plugfest demonstrated an impressive 882 25G link …

Global spending on Ethernet cables will soon cross the $1bn threshold, say analysts. A forecast report from Allied Market Research projects that by 2022, businesses will be shelling out more than a billion dollars annually on copper and fiber cables to transmit data and power. The figures include the spend on fiber and copper …

The IEEE has approved the specification covering 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps Ethernet, 802.3bz. In particular, the approval signifies that the work item still incomplete at the end of 2015, the interface between the Media Access Control (MAC) and the physical (PHY) layers has been completed. Last December, NBase-T Alliance leader …