Infinera's XR optics pluggable plans

Infinera’s coherent pluggables for XR optics will also address the company’s metro needs.

Coherent pluggables now dominate the metro market where embedded designs account for just a fifth of all ports, says Infinera.

Robert Shore

“As we grow our metro business, we need our own pluggables if we want to be cost-competitive,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of marketing at Infinera.

Infinera’s family of pluggables implementing the XR optics concept is dubbed ICE-XR.

XR optics splits a coherent optical signal into Nyquist sub-carriers, each carrying a data payload. Twenty-five gigabits will likely be the sub-carrier capacity chosen.

XR optics can be used for point-to-point links where all the sub-carriers go to the same destination. But the sub-carriers can also be steered to different destinations, similar to how breakout cables are used in the data centre.

With XR optics, a module can talk to several lower-speed ones in a point-to-multipoint arrangement. This enables optical feeds to be summed, ideal for traffic aggregation applications such as access and 5G.

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Juniper Networks to acquire Aurrion for $165 million

The announcement of the acquisition was low key. A CTO blog post and a statement that Juniper Networks had entered into an agreement to acquire Aurrion, the fabless silicon photonics start-up. No fee was mentioned.

However, in the company's US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Juniper values the deal at approximately $165 million. "The Company believes the acquisition will help to fuel its long-term competitive advantage by enabling cost-effective, high-density, high-speed optical networks," it said. The deal is expected to be closed this quarter.

Source: Gazettabyte

At first glance, Juniper is simply the latest in a series of systems vendors bringing silicon photonics in-house. Silicon photonics is a technology that allows photonic devices to be made on a silicon substrate, fabricated in a CMOS facility.

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Mellanox Technologies to acquire EZchip for $811M

Mellanox Technologies plans to acquire networking chip company EZchip Semiconductor in a deal worth U.S. $811 million.

Eyal Waldman

Mellanox makes InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnection platforms and products for the data centre while EZchip sells network and multi-core processors that are used in carrier edge routers and enterprise platforms.

EZchip’s customers include Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Oracle, Avaya and Cisco Systems.

“Mellanox needs to diversify its business; it is still heavily dependent on the high-performance computing market and InfiniBand,” says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, networking at market research firm The Linley Group. “EZchip helps move Mellanox into markets and customers that it would not have access to with its existing products.”

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Rockley demos a silicon photonics switch prototype

Part 1: Rockley Photonics

Rockley Photonics has made a prototype switch to help grow the number of servers that can be linked in a data centre. The issue with interconnection networks inside a data centre is that they do not scale linearly as more servers are added.  

Dr. Andrew Rickman

“If you double the number of servers connected in a mega data centre, you don’t just double the complexity of the network, it goes up exponentially,” explains Andrew Rickman, co-founder, chairman and CEO at Rockley Photonics. “That is the problem we are addressing.”

By 2017 and 2018, it will still be possible to build the networks that large-scale data centre network operators require, says Rickman, but at an ever increasing cost and with a growing power consumption. “The basic principles of what they are doing needs to be rethought,” he says.

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60-second interview with Infonetics' Andrew Schmitt

Market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc., has issued its 2014 summary of the global wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) equipment market. Andrew Schmitt, research director for carrier transport networking, in a Q&A with Gazettabyte.

Andrew Schmitt

Q: Infonetics claims the global WDM market grew 6% in 2014, to total US $10 billion. What accounted for such impressive growth in 2014?

AS: Primarily North American strength from data centre-related spending and growth in China.

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FPGAs embrace data centre co-processing role

Part 1: Xilinx's SDAccel development tool

The PCIe accelerator card has a power budget of 25W. Hyper data centres can host hundreds of thousands of servers whereas other industries with more specialist computation requirements use far fewers servers. As such, they can afford a higher power budget per card. Source: Xilinx

Xilinx has developed a software-design environment that simplifies the use of an FPGA as a co-processor alongside the server's x86 instruction set microprocessor.

Dubbed SDAccel, the development environment enables a software engineer to write applications using OpenCL, C or the C++ programming language running on servers in the data centre.   

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Alcatel-Lucent serves up x86-based IP edge routing

Alcatel-Lucent has re-architected its edge IP router functions - its service router operating system (SR OS) and applications - to run on Intel x86 instruction-set servers.

Shown is the VSR running on one server and distributed across several servers. Source: Alcatel-Lucent.

The company's Virtualized Service Router portfolio aims to reduce the time it takes operators to launch services and is the latest example of the industry trend of moving network functions from specialist equipment onto stackable servers, a development know as network function virtualisation (NFV).     

"It is taking IP routing and moving it into the cloud," says Manish Gulyani, vice president product marketing for Alcatel-Lucent's IP routing and transport business. 

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