Optical virtual switch platform targets data centers

Optical subsystem vendor CoAdna Photonics has unveiled its Gen-2 Optical Virtual Switching (OvS) platform. Aimed at Big Data and cloud service applications, the OvS platform enables a distributed wavelength cross-connection (DWXC) that supports reconfigurable WDM optical interconnects among core-switches or server racks in data center networks.

"Driven by big data and cloud service applications, east-west traffics within a data center network have been growing exponentially. Network performance and cost issues associated with the east-west traffic growth become more and more a pain point for the data center operators. CoAdna's OvS platform and technology is created to solve this problem," commented Dr. Jim Yuan, chairman and CEO of CoAdna.

Built upon CoAdna's LightFlow wavelength selective switches (WSSs), the Gen-2 OvS platform can be used to create a distributed optical backplane that can interconnect up to 12 spine or aggregation switches with redundant full mesh interconnection and reconfigurable bandwidth. It also can support flattened-butterfly network architectures with simplified cabling and improved network performance. Up to 200 racks with 20 to 40 servers on each rack can be interconnected in such a network, CoAdna asserts. The Gen-2 OvS has a built-in OpenFlow 1.3 interface to support operation via software-defined network (SDN) principles.

"In the past year, we have engaged with several partners to explore the OvS' full potential and we have seen very encouraging results," Dr. Yuan continued. "We look forward to more collaboration with industry partners to bring this innovative technology into full commercialization for cost-effective and environment-friendly Big Data and cloud services to help make people's lives better."

Source: Lightwave