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Arrcus looks to 400G future, Tonga stuck on satellite connection, and Linux Foundation's new edge computing effort

Plus more of the week's networking nuggets

Roundup Relative newcomer Arrcus wants to help networking upstarts follow the industry's juggernauts into the 400Gbps Ethernet world with the latest update to its year-old ArcOS network operating system.

Speaking to The Register ahead of the launch, founder and CEO Devesh Garg said the migration to 400G will take the industry about two years, and that should give challenger vendors the chance to play.

The challengers Arrcus wants are white-box vendors for now, particularly those using Broadcom's latest StrataXGS chipsets, the 12.8Tbps Tomahawk 3, top-of-rack Trident 3, and Jericho switch/router silicon – targeting service provider and large-scale enterprise markets.

Garg claimed Arrcus is the first independent OS vendor to port to the Tomahawk 3.

That's the switch silicon: ArcOS itself is built to run on either Intel or Arm architectures, and it supports Intel's DPAP (data plane adaptation layer).

Garg told The Register what anchors Arcuss' ability to expand its support quickly is that the OS puts as much as possible of its functionality into userspace so there's only a "minimal" dependency on the Linux kernel.

The company's hope is that if there's take-up among vendors, end users will get to build their networks independently of the hardware, and have access to a consistent set of APIs like OpenConfig, YANG, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and OpenDaylight, for management, configuration and orchestration.

Infinera bags Telstra

Infinera this week announced it's won a contract to provide its Infinite Capacity Engine 4 (ICE4) technology to Australian incumbent Telstra.

The deal will expand Telstra's submarine cable capacity to Asia Pacific by 160 per cent, and its port density by 140 per cent.

The ICE4 is a photonic IC that supports features like sliceable photonics, multi-terabit superchannels, encryption at Layer 1, and extended reach for submarine networks.

Catalyst switches suffer memory leak

Customers with Cisco Catalyst 3650, 3850, 9300 and 9500 devices need to pop over to Switchzilla and get a software update.

The issue occurs if the device in question is running Cisco IOS XE version 16.3.5, 16.6.1, or 16.6.2, according to the field notice.

The linux_iosd-imag and platform_mgr processes are affected by the bug, in which memory is "not freed correctly".

In this forum discussion, user John LeFrance said a "doomsday timer" of 43 weeks and 4 days means an affected master switch in a stack can lock up because of the leak, and need restarting.

Submarine cable laid, another one broken

The new INDIGO cable system in South Asia is closer to carrying traffic for Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Australian academic network AARNet, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra with the completion of the marine part of the network.

The end of marine work was signalled by splicing the INDIGO West (Singapore to Perth) and INDIGO Central (Perth to Sydney) cables, each 4,600km long.

The system is due to be commissioned by mid-2019, and at launch the coherent optical system's two fibre pairs will have an aggregate capacity of 36 Tbps.

Meanwhile, the Pacific Island nation of Tonga is struggling along with a satellite connection following an outage earlier this week on its only cable link.

According to local reports, the 827km cable developed a fault last Sunday, with a low voltage detected about 80km from Tonga.

Diagnosis and repair could take as long as two weeks, so in the meantime the island's two ISPs Tonga Communications and Digicel Tonga are funnelling traffic through a Ka-band satellite operated by Kacific Satellite.

Linux Foundation kicks off another edge effort

Apparently, the Akraino Edge Stack effort isn't enough, because the Linux Foundation has launched another edge effort: LF Edge.

In fact, as the foundation's announcement said, Akraino has become a piece of the new effort, alongside other existing projects – EdgeX Foundry, and the Open Glossary of Edge Compting.

Bringing the total projects under LF Edge to five will be work from Samsung ("a hub for real-time data collected through smart home devices") and ZEDEDA, which will produce an "agnostic standard edge architecture".

The result, the foundation said, will be an "an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system", all under the LF Edge umbrella.

Combining the three existing projects gives LF Edge more than 50 members at launch. ®

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