Books in 2015 - Part 2

More book recommendations - Part 2 

Yuriy Babenko, senior network architect, Deutsche Telekom

The books I particularly enjoyed in 2015 dealt with creativity, strategy, and social and organisational development.

People working in IT are often right-brained people; we try to make our decisions rationally, verifying hypotheses and build scenarios and strategies. An alternative that challenges this status quo and looks at issues from a different perspective is Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.

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Arista adds coherent CFP2 modules to its 7500 switch

Arista Networks has developed a coherent optical transport line card for its 7500 high-end switch series. The line card hosts six 100 gigabit CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) and has a reach of up to 5,000 km.

Martin Hull

Several optical equipment makers have announced ‘stackable’ platforms specifically to link data centres in the last year.

Infinera’s Cloud Xpress was the first while Coriant recently detailed its Groove G30 platform. Arista’s announcement offers data centre managers an alternative to such data centre interconnect platforms by adding dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optics directly onto its switch. 

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Books in 2015 - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking various industry figures to recommend key books they have read this year.

Andrew Schmitt, founder and CEO at Cignal AI

I didn’t read that much this year but I did read The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. That was outstanding.  McCullough is a great historical author and wrote a book that was both a biography of the Wrights as well as a narrative of their efforts to build the first powered airplane.

I didn't know of all of the other simultaneous, better-financed efforts that fell far short of the efforts of two brothers from Dayton, Ohio. I also was unaware of how the effort transfixed the world when they did complete it.

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SDM and MIMO: An interview with Bell Labs

Bell Labs is claiming an industry first in demonstrating the recovery in real time of multiple signals sent over spatial-division multiplexed fibre. Gazettabyte spoke to two members of the research team to understand more.

Part 2: The capacity crunch and the role of SDM

The argument for spatial-division multiplexing (SDM) - the sending of optical signals down parallel fibre paths, whether multiple modes, cores or fibres - is the coming ‘capacity crunch’. The information-carrying capacity limit of fibre, for so long described as limitless, is being approached due to the continual yearly high growth in IP traffic. But if there is a looming capacity crunch, why are we not hearing about it from the world’s leading telcos? 

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Coriant's 134 terabit data centre interconnect platform

Coriant is the latest optical networking equipment maker to unveil a data centre interconnect product. The company claims its Groove G30 platform is the industry’s highest capacity, most power efficient design. 

“We have several customers that have either purpose-built data centre interconnect networks or have data centre interconnect as a key application riding on top of their metro or long-haul networks,” says Jean-Charles Fahmy, vice president of cloud and data centre at Coriant.

Jean-Charles Fahmy

Each card in the platform is one rack unit (1RU) high and has a total capacity of 3.2 terabit-per-second, while the full G30 rack supports 42 such cards for a total platform capacity of 134 terabits. The G30's power consumption equates to 0.45W-per-gigabit.

The card supports up to 1.6 terabit line-side capacity and up to 1.6 terabit of client side interfaces. The card can hold eight silicon photonics-based CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) line-side pluggables. For the client-side optics, 16, 100 gigabit QSFP28 modules can be used or 20 QSFP+ modules that support 40 or 4x10 gigabit rates.

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Bell Labs demos real-time MIMO over multicore fibre

Part 1 of 2

Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has used a real-time receiver to recover a dozen 2.5-gigabit signals sent over a coupled three-core fibre. Until now the signal processing for such spatial-division multiplexed transmissions have been done offline due to the computational complexity involved.

“The era of real-time experiments in spatial-division multiplexing is starting and this is the very first example” - Peter Winzer

“The era of real-time experiments in spatial-division multiplexing is starting and this is the very first example,” said Peter Winzer, head of the Optical Transmission Systems and Networks Research Department at Bell Labs. “Such real-time experiments are the next stepping stone towards a true product implementation.”    

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COBO looks inside and beyond the data centre

The Consortium of On-Board Optics is working on 400 gigabit optics for the data centre and also for longer-distance links. COBO is a Microsoft-led initiative tasked with standardising a form factor for embedded optics.

Established in March 2015, the consortium already has over 50 members and expects to have early specifications next year and first hardware by late 2017.

Brad Booth

Brad Booth, the chair of COBO and principal architect for Microsoft’s Azure Global Networking Services, says Microsoft plans to deploy 100 gigabit in its data centres next year and that when the company started looking at 400 gigabit, it became concerned about the size of the proposed pluggable modules, and the interface speeds needed between the switch silicon and the pluggable module.

“What jumped out at us is that we might be running into an issue here,” says Booth.

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