Arista adds coherent CFP2 modules to its 7500 switch

Arista Networks has developed a coherent optical transport line card for its 7500 high-end switch series. The line card hosts six 100 gigabit CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) and has a reach of up to 5,000 km.

Martin Hull

Several optical equipment makers have announced ‘stackable’ platforms specifically to link data centres in the last year.

Infinera’s Cloud Xpress was the first while Coriant recently detailed its Groove G30 platform. Arista’s announcement offers data centre managers an alternative to such data centre interconnect platforms by adding dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optics directly onto its switch. 

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Coriant's 134 terabit data centre interconnect platform

Coriant is the latest optical networking equipment maker to unveil a data centre interconnect product. The company claims its Groove G30 platform is the industry’s highest capacity, most power efficient design. 

“We have several customers that have either purpose-built data centre interconnect networks or have data centre interconnect as a key application riding on top of their metro or long-haul networks,” says Jean-Charles Fahmy, vice president of cloud and data centre at Coriant.

Jean-Charles Fahmy

Each card in the platform is one rack unit (1RU) high and has a total capacity of 3.2 terabit-per-second, while the full G30 rack supports 42 such cards for a total platform capacity of 134 terabits. The G30's power consumption equates to 0.45W-per-gigabit.

The card supports up to 1.6 terabit line-side capacity and up to 1.6 terabit of client side interfaces. The card can hold eight silicon photonics-based CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) line-side pluggables. For the client-side optics, 16, 100 gigabit QSFP28 modules can be used or 20 QSFP+ modules that support 40 or 4x10 gigabit rates.

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Cyan's stackable optical rack for data centre interconnent

Demand for high-capacity links between data centres is creating a new class of stackable optical platform from equipment makers. Cyan has unveiled the N-Series, what it calls an open hyperscale transport platform. "It is a hardware and software system specifically for data centre interconnect," says Joe Cumello, Cyan's chief marketing officer. Cyan's announcement follows on from Infinera, which detailed its Cloud Xpress platform last year.

"The drivers for these [data centre] guys every day of the week is lowest cost-per-gigabit"

Joe Cumello

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OFC 2014 industry reflections - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts following the recent OFC 2014 exhibition and conference: the noteworthy developments and trends, what they learnt at the show, and the topics to track in the coming year.  

T.J. Xia, distinguished member of technical staff at Verizon

The CFP2 form factor pluggable - analogue coherent optics (CFP2-ACO) at 100 and 200 Gig will become the main choice for metro core networks in the near future. 

I learnt that the discrete multitone (DMT) modulation format seems the right choice for a low-cost, single-wavelength direct-detection 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)  interface for data ports, and a 4xDMT for 400GbE ports. 

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