Optical switch increases capacity by up to 50%
Huber+Suhner says that its Polatis optical switch platform is designed to provide operators with 50 per cent more capacity than any other available today.
The Polatis iSeries 7000 software-defined optical circuit switch platform has a resilient, modular architecture designed for volume manufacture. It is scalable from 8 x 8 up to 576 x 576 non-blocking fibre ports. As a result, telecomms and data centre operators can remotely connect more fibres together in a compact form factor, says the company.
The Polatis has low optical loss and fast switching speeds, adds Huber+Suhner.
Nick Parsons, senior vice president Engineering & Technology, explained that they save time and money when servicing new connection requests or reconfiguring, by bringing network automation down to the fibre layer.
“With the iSeries concept, we have re-architected the core switch engine to feature resilient, distributed control and a simplified, integrated design that improves both energy efficiency and port density. Based on the 576 x 576 concept, we expect to roll out the modular iSeries design platform across the whole Polatis portfolio – including the industry-leading 384 x 384 and 192 x 192 switch sizes – to meet the increasing demand for dynamic fibre connectivity in our customers’ networks,” he said.
The company is working with cloud service provider partners to create next-generation energy-efficient network architectures that use optical switching to enable rapid service provisioning and can also dramatically improve data centre utilisation through optical disaggregation of compute, storage and accelerator resources,” he added.
The Polatis iSeries 7000 optical switches are built on the patented DirectLight transparent, dark-fibre optical switching platform, used in data centre, telecomms, defence and test applications.
There is support for software-defined networks (SDNs) via embedded NETCONF/YANG interfaces, meaning that Polatis optical switches are 100 times more energy-efficient than conventional electronic switching equipment, says Huber+Suhner. This also enables dynamic routing, monitoring, protection and test of real-time traffic directly at the fibre layer with speed-of light data latency, for rapid deployment of new network orchestration solutions.
