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 Coun ...
which operated during the 1980s and 1990s. Its co-founders,
Vinod Bhardwaj, 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 digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
and
Silver Lake Partners.
In 1989 and 1990, Kalpana introduced the first multiport
Ethernet switch, its seven-port EtherSwitch.
The invention of Ethernet switching made Ethernet networks faster, cheaper, and easier to manage. Multi-port
network switches 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.
Kalpana also invented
EtherChannel, which provides higher inter-switch bandwidth by running several links in parallel. This innovation, more generally called
link aggregation, 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
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kalpana (Company)
Cisco Systems acquisitions
1994 mergers and acquisitions
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct computer companies of the United States