MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Matisse Networks, the leader in optical burst switching (OBS), today announced availability of the EtherBurst(TM) optical switch consisting of the SX-1000 Ethernet Service Node, the PX-1000 Photonic Node and the MatisseView management system. EtherBurst is the industry's first optical burst switch, purpose-built for scaling metropolitan aggregation networks from 10 to 640 Gbps. EtherBurst seamlessly integrates the any-to-any flexibility of Ethernet switching with the enormous bandwidth of dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM), resulting in substantial reductions in capital and operating expenditures. Applications for EtherBurst include IPTV and business Ethernet services offered by service-providers, and private campus networks deployed by businesses, universities and government agencies.

"After recent testing, we found Matisse Networks' optical burst switching technology to be the kind of reliable and powerful high-bandwidth interconnect solution that meets our current needs," said Mark Seager, assistant department head for Advanced Technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Managed as a single large distributed layer 2 switch, the performance of this optical switch is well suited to our systems. The result is a scalable plug-and-play solution with the potential to greatly enhance our computational capabilities, and consequently, our ability to fulfill our national security missions."

To overcome Ethernet's current limitation of 10 Gbps in metro aggregation applications, metro networks are built by layering Ethernet over DWDM systems, which rely on pre-provisioned point-to-point optical circuits. This architecture suffers from a fundamental problem that arises where packet-switched services meet the circuit-based fiber optic transport. Overcoming the inherent discontinuity at this juncture of packets and circuits imposes considerable complexity in the network's design. The resulting inefficiencies waste network capacity, place severe limits on scalability, and substantially increase overall costs.

"EtherBurst is the first technology we've seen that is capable of building packet networks over fiber with such a high degree of ease and automation, and at capacities higher than 10 Gbps," commented Michael Howard, principal analyst and co-founder of Infonetics Research. "With the metro marketplace experiencing rapid growth from demand for new bandwidth-intensive applications like IPTV, EtherBurst is appearing on the scene at the right time."

Matisse Networks