Preventing Roadrunner Intrusions with Coyote-grade IPS Appliances.... beep beep - (Part 1 of 3)

I read an article recently (http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-254433.html) that believe it or not flashed by my screen as an ad and yes I clicked it. Now the fact that I clicked on an ad aside, the contents of the article were more important. It stated Intel has announced a revolution in photo detector technology that could drastically revolutionize the speed and performance of networks we use today. The technology which is based on a silicon chip doped with germanium, rather than the more expensive materials currently used in photo detectors will significantly reduce the cost of fiber optic communication. Moreover, the new photo detectors will increase the performance and range limits for fiber lines. In some reported tests, speeds up to 200 Gbps have been created with equipment at costs comparable to copper lines.
Naturally seeing this got me very curious about the technology and how close it is to production networking and communication hardware. It turns out this technology was announced by Intel in September of 2007 (http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/09/40g_photodetector.php) at this point there was still quite a bit of research necessary before the components would be commercially viable. “Simple things” such as differences in the crystal structure size of silicon and germanium in nano scale would introduce complications in production. As it stands, this technology is still being developed to improve stability and improve performance. There is a nice YouTube video which appears to be presented by a researcher from Intel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOJC4q6-ACY). She goes into the details of the chips and some of the major design changes that are needed to help with the convergence from light to voltage.
We can expect to see the majority of enterprise and even small business networks migrating over to the technology once the kinks are worked out and the chips become production ready. So what does this mean for those of us in the security industry? … To be continued