Software-defined optical circuit switch adds network capacity
Huber+Suhner has released the Polatis 576 optical circuit switch which has been designed to provide operators with 80 per cent more capacity than any other solution on the market, according to the company.
The Polatis 576 software-defined optical circuit switch has a resilient, redundant, and modular architecture that underpins the reliability and availability of the switch in a network environment. To protect mission critical services, the Polatis 576 can be equipped with field-addressable spare ports so that an interruption on any port can be bypassed rapidly by moving the fibre to a spare port and for software to reassign the port.
The high performance, high density Polatis optical switch platform have low optical loss and fast switching speeds for even the most demanding of applications.
The matrix of 576×576 non-blocking fibre ports enables operators to remotely connect a large number of fibres together in a compact form factor in applications such as cybersecurity and network monitoring, test lab automation and data centre cross connects. The Polatis 576 variant with MPO (multi-fibre push on) connectors occupies just 8RU of rack space.
“Our Polatis optical circuit switches enable network automation directly at the fibre layer to save time, cost and power when creating new user connections, upgrading data centre line rates, monitoring network services or managing test operations,” said Nick Parsons, vice president of technology at Huber+Suhner Communications. “We have re-architected the core switch engine in our new Polatis platform to feature resilient, distributed control and a compact, integrated design that improves both energy efficiency and port density”.
The low-loss Polatis 576 optical switch utilises the patented DirectLight transparent, dark fibre optical switching platform that has been proven in the most challenging data centre, telecomms, test and defence applications for more than two decades.
The Polatis optical circuit switches support software-defined networks (SDNs) via embedded NetConf and RestConf interfaces. Polatis optical circuit switches are 100 times more energy-efficient than conventional electronic switching equipment, said Huber + Suhner, and enable dynamic routing, monitoring, protection and test of real-time traffic directly at the fibre layer with low data latency.
