Nortel Networks and Hewlett-Packard recently announced they intend to work together to develop high-speed interfaces linking HP servers with Nortel optical networking gear.
The products will be targeted at content service providers experiencing bandwidth bottlenecks in Internet data centres.
The two companies will investigate joint commercial development of a 10Gbps Ethernet network interface card for HP's Superdome and HP 9000 servers. Last month, at NetWorld+Interop 2000 in Atlanta, Nortel and HP demonstrated integration of computing platforms and dense wave division multiplexing optical network technology over 10Gbps Ethernet.
The 10Gbps Ethernet product will be designed to eliminate congestion caused by multiple router hops within traditional Internet data centres, Nortel says.
Nortel, citing data from International Data Cooperation (IDC), said the Internet data centre infrastructure market is expected to be a $US18 billion business by 2003. Nortel also says service providers will build about 740 Internet data centres over the next three years, again citing research from IDC.
Nortel and HP are also sizing up other technologies as potential bottleneck breakers for Internet data centres. Some of these technologies include optically enabled storage and content networks, and centralised service management based on the combination of HP's OpenView and Nortel's Preside management platforms.