“A lot of the times we were doing these alliances [such as the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance] around big projects,” said Brad Booth, president of the new association, who is also director of advanced products at Ottawa’s Quake Technologies.
“But a lot of the smaller things we were working on never got folded into an alliance.”
So earlier this year several manufacturers formed a new group to promote all forms of the networking technology that come under the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
“We were finding there was a lot of miscommunication about what the technology was and how it could be applied to new markets,” said Booth.
There are 46 principal or participating members ranging from giant networking manufacturers to carriers, a number Booth hopes will hit 80 by the end of the year.
Members include Cisco Systems, 3Com, Broadcom, Intel, Fujitsu Microelectronics, Pioneer Corp., Sun Microsystems, Samsung Electronics, Systimax, Tyco Electronics and Xilinx.
Booth said he hopes to add more Canadian companies such as Nortel Networks and PMC Sierra of Burnaby, B.C.
Among the most recent activities, Alliance members participated in several panels at last week’s Server Blade Summit in Los Angeles on topics ranging from Backplane Ethernet, an emerging technology, and bringing 10Gigabit Ethernet to the data center.
Broad bylaws
David Law, an Alliance director who is also an Edinburgh-based consultant engineer for 3Com and vice-chair of the IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet) committee, noted that bylaws of other Ethernet groups essentially forced them to die once their standards had been accepted. The Ethernet Alliance’s bylaws, by contrast, have been written to avoid that and allow it to support anything covered by IEEE 802.
So, for example, the Alliance can back experiments such as residential Ethernet, which Law said officially comes under the IEEE’s 802.1 switching committee.
Other areas the Alliance will dip its toes into are Backplane Ethernet (Ethernet within a telecommunications chassis), 10GBaseLRM (a multi-mode fibre-based version), Power-over-Ethernet, and the next speed standard, which could be 100 gigabits per second.
However, its most immediate concern will be boosting the 10GBaseT (Ethernet over copper wires) standard, expected to be approved by the IEEE shortly.
No sign of dying
Why bother with an association for a technology that dates back to 1980 and shows no sign of dying?
It’s moving from the enterprise to homes and being adopted not only by the networking industry but also by aircraft manufacturers.
The IEEE is very good at writing standards, replied Law, but it doesn’t do the sort of promoting that VARs need – such as perform interoperability demonstrations, write instructional white papers – or help incubate ideas that go to the institute.
“Multi-vendor interoperability demonstrations are very important to show end-users that they should have confidence in the technology and its ready for deployment,” Law said.
Booth, who has worked for Bell Northern Research, PMC Sierra and Intel doing silicon design, said the Alliance will give VARs a “‘relatively unbiased” source of information on the technology.