Luxtera announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) selected the company's 40G Blazar active optical cable (AOC) to interconnect its multi-room data center.
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Spanning the distance from one to 4,000 meters, NOAA said that the Blazar cabling provides the required extended reach to interconnect supercomputing systems and data storage in a campus environment across multiple rooms and floors. The cable provides NOAA with interconnects needed to compute environmental simulation models as well as predict short-term weather and climate forecasts.
“Luxtera has proven itself and its products to be worthy of NOAA’s specialized requirements at a lower price than competing vendors,” said Craig Tierney, HPC leader for NOAA. “During the installation process, Luxtera was able to quickly surpass any length and spacing challenges previously associated with working between our various floors. They delivered the high performance necessary to assist computing systems in weather forecasting as well as maximize our data center layout to guarantee network longevity.”
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Blazar harnesses the benefits of Luxtera's Silicon Photonics technology by combining nanophotonic elements with conventional CMOS circuits on a single, monolithic die. Billed as delivering the performance of fiber optics at a lower cost and longer reach than traditional multimode fiber VCSEL interconnects, the Blazar provides NOAA with point-to-point connectivity in its data centers at data rates of 40 Gbps and up. Blazar also offers the ruggedness and reliability associated with copper solutions while breaking reach limitations to fulfill NOAA’s demand for long reach and high bandwidth connectivity.
“NOAA required a solution that could efficiently connect its computing systems across multiple rooms and floors. Blazar’s long reach capability meets these requirements and provides NOAA with data center design flexibility at a low cost,” said Marek Tlalka, vice president of marketing for Luxtera. “Blazar enables NOAA to overcome facility constraints to deploy accurate weather forecasting software used for critical weather predictions like hurricanes, through a reliable, high speed network.”
Luxtera will showcase Blazar at the OpenFabrics Sonoma Workshop, taking place at The Lodge at Sonoma, on Monday, March 15 from 1:30 p.m.-7:00 p.m. The company will also take part in the panel discussion “Cables and Connectors at Higher Gigs: IB and Ethernet Roadmaps” on Monday, March 15 from 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.