Dec 16 2014
CALIENT Technologies, Inc., the global leader for optical circuit switching technology, today announced it has joined with the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), a 10-university research organization to expand the use of optical circuit switching in software defined data center and metro networks.
CALIENT will participate in a range of planned CIAN research activities. One project will study optical network pre-configuration and recovery during and after disaster scenarios. This could potentially avoid major outages in the telecommunications network that can ripple into other networks including the power grid, such as those seen during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
A second project will see a CALIENT S320 optical circuit switch deployed in Columbia University’s electrical engineering lab for research into software control plane solutions for hybrid packet-optical data center networks, building on concepts pioneered in U.C. San Diego’s CIAN project, HELIOS, in 2010.
CALIENT is pioneering hybrid packet-optical data centers commercially and is already deploying large numbers of optical circuit switches in cloud data centers where the economic and performance benefits are compelling.
The Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) is an engineering research center, funded by the National Science Foundation, comprised of 10 universities with the vision of a transformed Internet that would enable end-user access to emerging real time, on-demand network services at data-rates up to 100Gbps. The center is focused on enabling access to these services anywhere, at anytime, at low cost and with high-energy efficiency.
CALIENT’s S320 is used to create a network fabric with total throughput of more than 32 terabits per second. The switch allows any-to-any network connections with almost no latency and can be reconfigured on demand through a software-defined network (SDN) controller. Each switch port is transparent to bit rate and can support data speeds to 100 Gbps and beyond. The S320 is used in cloud data centers, collocation and multi-tenant facilities, other emerging datacenter and metro applications.
“Optical circuit switching offers compelling advantages in today’s cloud data centers and the metro networks that connect them,” said Daniel Tardent, Vice President of Marketing at CALIENT. “We’re excited to work with the CIAN team to expand the role of this technology in new network applications.”
“We welcome CALIENT into our research consortium and look forward to collaborating on next-generation data center and metro network research,” said Dr. Dan Kilper, Administrative Director of CIAN. “We have a strong interest in research that leads to commercially deployable solutions and we believe that we can move quickly with CALIENT to achieve this end. The fact that their high-port-count optical circuit switches are already fully field proven is an important foundation for our collective efforts.”
About CALIENT Technologies
CALIENT Technologies is the global leader in pure photonic Optical Circuit Switching with systems that enable dynamic optical layer optimization in next generation datacenters, software defined networks, and media production facilities worldwide. CALIENT’s 3D MEMS switches provide optical path switching at up to seven-times lower cost than conventional packet-based solutions. The company designs and builds its systems using its own state-of-the-art MEMS Fab facility located at its corporate headquarters in Santa Barbara, California. For more information, visit CALIENT at http://www.calient.net, on Twitter and LinkedIn, or contact us at: [email protected].
About the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN)
The CIAN Engineering Research Center’s (ERC) vision is to create transformative technologies for optical access networks where virtually any application requiring any resource can be seamlessly and efficiently aggregated and interfaced with existing and future core networks in a cost-effective manner.
Source: http://www.calient.net