ADVA's 100 Terabit data centre interconnect platform

• The FSP 3000 CloudConnect comes in several configurations
• The data centre interconnect platform scales to 100 terabits of throughput
• The chassis use a thin 0.5 RU QuadFlex card with up to 400 Gig transport capacity
• The optical line system has been designed to be open and programmable

ADVA Optical Networking has unveiled its FSP 3000 CloudConnect, a data centre interconnect product designed to cater for the needs of the different data centre players. The company has developed several sized platforms to address the workloads and bandwidth needs of data centre operators such as Internet content providers, communications service providers, enterprises, cloud and colocation players.

Certain Internet content providers want to scale the performance of their computing clusters across their data centres. A cluster is a grouping of distributed computing comprising a defined number of virtual machines and processor cores (see Clusters, pods and recipes explained, bottom). Yet there are also data centre operators that only need to share limited data between their sites.

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Ciena's stackable platform for data centre interconnect

Ciena is the latest system vendor to unveil its optical transport platform for the burgeoning data centre interconnect market. Data centre operators require scalable platforms that can carry significant amounts of traffic to link sites over metro and long-haul distances, and are power efficient. 

The Waveserver stackable interconnect system delivers 800 Gig traffic throughput in a 1 rack unit (1RU) form factor. The throughput comprises 400 Gigabit of client-side interfaces and 400 Gigabit coherent dense WDM transport. 

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Ciena's Tom Mock reflects on a career in telecom

It has been a strange week for Tom Mock. Not only is it his last at Ciena, after working for the company for 18 years, it has also been abnormally quiet since many of his colleagues are away at the OFC show in Los Angeles. 

Working for one technology company for so long may be uncommon, says Mock, but not at Ciena: the CTO has clocked 20 years while the CEO boasts 15 years. 

Tom Mock: “I’m about ready to go do something else.”

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Oclaro demonstrates flexible rate coherent pluggable module

• The CFP2 coherent optical module operates at 100 and 200 Gig
• Samples are already with customers, with general availability in the first half of 2015
• Oclaro to also make more CFP2 100GBASE-LR4 products

The CFP2 is not just used in metro/ regional networks but also in long-haul applications

Robert Blum

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OFDM promises compact Terabit transceivers

Source ECI Telecom

A one Terabit super-channel, crafted using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), has been transmitted over a live network in Germany. The OFDM demonstration is the outcome of a three-year project conducted by the Tera Santa Consortium comprising Israeli companies and universities.

Current 100 Gig coherent networks use a single carrier for the optical transmission whereas OFDM imprints the transmitted data across multiple sub-carriers. OFDM is already used as a radio access technology, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular standard being one example.

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ClariPhy samples a 200 Gigabit coherent DSP-ASIC

ClariPhy Communications has entered the 100 Gigabit coherent merchant chip market after announcing first samples of its LightSpeed-II devices. 

The family of coherent digital signal processing ASICs (DSP-ASICs) is manufactured using a 28nm CMOS process. "We believe it is the first 28nm standard product, and leaps ahead of the current generation [DSP-ASIC] devices," says Paul Voois, co-founder and chief strategy officer at ClariPhy.

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Xtera demonstrates 40 Terabit using Raman amplification

Feature: 100 Gig and Beyond. Part 2

• Xtera's Raman amplification boosts capacity and reach
• 40 Terabit optical transmission over 1,500km in Verizon trial
• 64 Terabit over 1,500km in 2015 using a Raman module operating over 100nm of spectrum  

Herve Fevrier

Optical transport equipment makers continue to research techniques to increase the data carried long distances over a fibre without sacrificing reach. The techniques include signal processing of the transmit signal to cram data-carrying channels closer in the C-band, advanced soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) and receiver signal processing to counter transmission impairments.

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