Market Challenge: Higher Bandwidth and Integration at Lower Costs

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet, LAN, WAN and SAN OEM equipment manufacturers face enormous challenges to develop cost effective products which satisfy the need for gigabit – and faster – communication, server, and storage systems.

However, a key obstacle to rapid deployment of universal high-speed connectivity in each of these markets is the ability to leverage inexpensive and widely installed copper or legacy fiber optic cable plants, since most of this existing cabling was never designed to carry data at gigabit rates. Consequently, many of the emerging standards must rely on complex DSP technology to meet increasing bandwidth demands.

For this reason, new standards for both copper and fiber optic cabling have been – or are being – developed in every major communications and computer networking market segment.

Examples:

  • LAN
    • 100 Gigabit Ethernet
    • Gigabit Ethernet

    WAN

    OC-192 / 100-Gigabit Ethernet
    DSL
    ATM

    SAN

    Fibre Channel
    InfiniBand

    While the bandwidth challenge seems formidable enough on its own, in order to differentiate their products, OEMs must also continually strive for higher levels of product functionality and integration, increase reliability, managability and scalability, while at the same time lowering power consumption and system costs.