Kalpana was a
computer-networking equipment manufacturer located in
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
which operated during the 1980s and 1990s. Its co-founders,
Vinod Bhardwaj Vinod ( hi, विनोद , mr, विनोद , gu, વિનોદ) is a male given name used in India and Nepal, meaning "delight", "enjoyment", or "pleasure".
People
*Vinod Agarwal, Indian-American businessman and scientist
*Vinod Agga ...
, an entrepreneur of Indian origin,
[Network world website](_blank)
Network website and
Larry Blair named the company after Bhardwaj's wife, Kalpana, whose name means "imagination" in
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
.
Charles Giancarlo
Charles Henry "Charlie" Giancarlo (born 1957) is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the chairman and CEO of data storage company Pure Storage. He is a former senior executive of Cisco Systems and Silver Lake Partners.
Education and c ...
was Kalpana's vice president of products and corporate development, became its General Manager, and went on to roles at
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...
and
Silver Lake Partners
Silver Lake is an American global private equity firm focused on investments in technology, technology-enabled and related industries. Founded in 1999, the firm is one of the largest technology investors in the world. Its investment holdings have ...
.
In 1989 and 1990, Kalpana introduced the first multiport
Ethernet
Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
switch, its seven-port EtherSwitch.
The invention of Ethernet switching made Ethernet networks faster, cheaper, and easier to manage. Multi-port
network switch
A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device.
A netw ...
es became common, gradually replacing
Ethernet hub
An Ethernet hub, active hub, network hub, repeater hub, multiport repeater, or simply hub is a network hardware device for connecting multiple Ethernet devices together and making them act as a single network segment. It has multiple input/out ...
s for almost all applications, and enabled an easy transition to 100-megabit
Fast Ethernet
In computer networking, Fast Ethernet physical layers carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s. The prior Ethernet speed was 10 Mbit/s. Of the Fast Ethernet physical layers, 100BASE-TX is by far the most common.
Fast Ethern ...
and later
Gigabit Ethernet
In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...
.
Kalpana also invented
EtherChannel
EtherChannel is a port link aggregation technology or port-channel architecture used primarily on Cisco switches. It allows grouping of several physical Ethernet links to create one logical Ethernet link for the purpose of providing fault-toleran ...
, which provides higher inter-switch bandwidth by running several links in parallel. This innovation, more generally called
link aggregation
In computer networking, link aggregation is the combining ( aggregating) of multiple network connections in parallel by any of several methods, in order to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, to provide redundan ...
, was also widely adopted throughout the industry. Kalpana also invented the Virtual LAN concept as closed broadcast domains, which was later replaced by 802.1Q.
Cisco Systems acquired Kalpana in 1994.
Product
Kalpana produced two models of Ethernet switch, the EPS-700 and the EPS-1500.
See also
*
List of acquisitions by Cisco
Cisco is an American computer networking company. Cisco made its first acquisition in 1993, which was followed by a series of further acquisitions.
History
Founded in 1984, Cisco did not acquire a company during the first seven years of its exi ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kalpana (Company)
Cisco Systems acquisitions
1994 mergers and acquisitions
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct computer companies of the United States