Anda Networks News

You can never have too much performance or too much bandwidth it seems. Regardless of how fast our broadband connections get, we develop applications which need more. SaaS, Telepresence and other forms of video are just a few examples of applications which corporations are adopting which take up more and more bandwidth.

Service providers constantly work to ensure they can supply the bandwidth their customers need and most recently the jump has been from 1 Gbps connections to 10 Gbps. If you are Greg Gum (pictured), a Vice President at Anda Networks, you know about these issues firsthand as your company supplies the equipment which service providers use to power their networks.

Responding to the surging need for faster connections, his company responded with a 10Gig Carrier Ethernet flavor of the company’s EtherReach product (pictured) called the EtherReach10G. According to Gum The 1 RU box supports the latest OAM capabilities and SLA verification metrics.

In addition, the box supports dual 10G uplinks and further has the ability to provision bandwidth in 1Mbps increments if needed.

Gum enthusiastically explained to me his company also has a new element management system which he says is the first to support multivendor carrier Ethernet equipment. This includes the following vendors: Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, Fujitsu, Juniper, Nortel, and Tellabs.

Gum explained, “Our service provider customers are aggressively rolling out next-generation Ethernet 2.0 access services which include the newest 802.1ag, Y.1731, and RFC2544 OAM implementations.” He continued, “However, they typically are faced with trying to scale their management and OSS solutions to rapidly deploy, remotely manage, monitor and provision, Ethernet networks which are inherently multi-vendor. With our next-generation EtherView 2.0 management software, carriers have the freedom to deploy best-of-breed equipment while maintaining carrier class management options that can be easily integrated into their current OSS solutions.”

I asked Gum why carriers should consider purchasing products from his company and to this he replied that in the carrier Ethernet access space – most large players have jettisoned their access equipment due to margin pressure. One of the advantages Anda brings to the table according to Gum is that they have a Silicon Valley/China model since they purchased an optical company deep in China.

They now can benefit from low labor rates and as a result are able to produce access equipment with good margins. This access equipment obviously works well with the Anda boxes in the network core.

Another reason he said to pick his company is because they have a very rich software base of features loaded onto their boxes and don’t rely mainly on a network processor like most of the competitors in the market. The network processor is slower according to Gum as it needs to keep track of statistics and diagnostics which are resource intensive.

They do much of this processing in hardware with FPGAs which is a lower cost, higher performance solution.

In the company’s S1 they explain this advantage to investors. Here is an excerpt:

We utilize a combination of FPGAs and standard chipsets as the processing backbone for our EtherTone platforms. To leverage available technology, we utilize standard chipsets for commoditized functionality, such as Ethernet switching, and use FPGAs to enable advanced functionality. Unlike standard application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, chipsets, custom chipsets, or network processors that are pre-loaded with embedded features and functionalities, FPGAs contain programmable logic components and interconnects, which enable a high degree of flexibility and performance. Our engineering team’s significant knowledge and experience with FPGAs enables us to develop proprietary algorithms to optimally program FPGAs with customized features and functionalities.

Manufacturing in China is certainly not new to tech companies – most hardware companies do the same. Certainly the high ratio of China workers to US does give Anda Networks superior efficiencies and they seem to be pursuing a smart strategy for enhancing their presence in carrier networks with higher levels of interoperability and performance. These are logical areas of focus since carriers are always looking for products to make their lives easier while allowing them to provide more and more profitable services.