“Holy Grail” Of Networking - The Wall Street Journal

27th November 2010, Intune CEO interviewed by the Wall Street Journal

http://intunetracker.blogspot.com/2010/11/finding-holy-grail-of-networking-wall.html

There are two words hideously over-used in the tech start-up world: “revolutionary” and “disruptive”. However, it is hard to think of other words to use about Intune Networks, an Irish high-tech start up that has technology that could catapult fibre efficiency from a few per cent up to the mid 80s.

I spoke to their CEO, Tim Friztley, in Dublin. Mr. Friztley is a grey-beard veteran of many years in the networking world including GTE, Tellabs, and most recently VP of Global Sales and Solutions at Microsoft TV. What decades of experience gives Mr. Friztley is the insight to know when a true-game changer has come along.

“I had a friend doing some work for me in Dublin and one day he gives me a call. He said ‘Look here Tim, these two PhD guys, John Dunne and Tom Farrell, these guys have invented an optical burst packet switch. And I broke out laughing. ‘If someone had invented that I would know about it by now’.

“This has been the holy grail of networking. The biggest labs in the world have been working on this problem. So I kind of scoffed at the fact that two kids in Dublin had a working optical burst packet switch.”

To cut a long story short: eight years and €49 million in funding later, that is exactly what they have done.

Shifting intelligence to the edge

The problem with networks today is that intelligence is at the centre, not the edge. So if you send an email from your address to your neighbour, the data is brought into the centre where it is sorted and then sent out again. It is a bit like sending a postcard from Cork airport to University College, Cork, and having it go via Dublin.

This is slow and it means local fibre loops have very little traffic flowing over them, while the central hubs are stuffed up.

“The best utilisation they [operators] get from their switches and fibre is 20%. Most cases its 5%, in many it is less than 1%,” says Mr. Friztley.

That means all that digging up the road, and all that expensive switching gear is sitting around doing practically nothing.

No sending data to the centre

How does Intune solve the problem? Put the smarts out on the edge. The heart of Intune’s system is a tuneable laser that can switch between one of 160 colours in nanoseconds.

Imagine a fibre loop with a series of nodes. Each node is assigned a colour and each is listening out for its colour. Along comes a packet. The system looks at the packet’s destination — let’s say it maps to the blue node — so the laser switches to blue and fires out the data. The next packet arrives nanoseconds later, it maps to the green node, the laser switches in nanoseconds and fires out that data. And so on.

In the loop, the nodes can pass on data on every other colour, but will “pluck out” the data on their own colour. So in our example above, the blue node picks up the data aimed at it, and delivers it, but simply passes through untouched the next packet on green, which the green node picks up and delivers.

This way data can be delivered locally without having to haul it all the way back to the centre, just to be sent back to edge, dramatically improving latency and the utilisation of the existing fibre.