High-speed optical communication provider, Finisar, will perform a joint technology demonstration with data storage technology provider, Xyratex, at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) 2012 exhibition.
Finisar and Xyratex, together with LSI, vario-optics and HUBER+SUHNER, will demonstrate embedded optical connectivity inside a 12 Gb/s enabled data storage enclosure to depict the mechanism of optical links in transmitting 12G SAS traffic between internal controllers through polymer optical waveguides.
Embedded optical interconnect solutions are engineered to fulfill the increasing requirement in data capacity, accessibility and bandwidth in future enterprise and cloud data centers and are anticipated to tackle the projected performance challenge in data storage subsystems.
The demonstration exploits Finisar's new optics technology called board-mounted optical assemblies (BOA) that provide very low power and very high bandwidth density. The BOA provides support to as high as 24 lanes of Ethernet, InfiniBand, PCIe, and SAS in addition to proprietary protocols that enable a completely new ecosystem of backplane applications and high-speed interconnects for switches, servers and supercomputers.
Finisar’s Vice-President of Marketing, Rafik Ward commented that the company is happy to work with these partners in the demonstration of its board-mounted optics technology for up to 28 Gb/s.
Xyratex will jointly demonstrate a prototype OneStor enclosure at the Finisar's booth in the exhibition. The prototype demonstration will highlight the successful way of implementing optical interconnects in SAS architectures and will exhibit Finisar's optical engines, Xyratex's next-generation 12G SAS controllers, LSI’s 12G expander technologies, HUBER+SUHNER's optical backplane connectors and vario-optic's polymer waveguides.
Source: http://www.finisar.com