Technology

The Open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) community is making rapid progress. Internet2 and the Internet2 network operations centre (NOC) at Indiana University announced that they have actively deployed ONOS on Internet2's nationwide research and education network in the US.

Researchers at Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre have successfully manufactured an 11-km length of hollow-core photonic bandgap fibre, a special type of fibre that until now has usually been made in lengths of hundreds of metres.

Hollow-core fibres, where light travels mainly in air, are interesting because they could reduce latency by about 30 per cent compared to standard solid-silica optical fibres.

ADVA Optical Networking is the latest vendor to unveil a purpose-built platform for data centre interconnect (DCI) with the launch of the ADVA FSP 3000 CloudConnect.

ADVA is no stranger to the data centre market, having had customers in this space since the day the company was founded, according to Jim Theodoras, its senior director of technical marketing. But he acknowledges that the pace of development is such that a new product was needed.

“Things are getting very competitive. Certainly the needs are changing and so we’ve come up with a completely new product,” he said.

University of Utah engineers have developed an ultra-compact beamsplitter – the smallest on record – for dividing light waves into two separate polarisations along separate paths.

The device brings researchers closer to producing complex silicon photonic chips that compute and shuttle data with light instead of electrons.

"It does one thing, insanely fast" - that's how Ciena introduced its new Waveserver platform, a compact yet high-capacity interconnect system tailored for the specific needs of the data centre interconnect (DCI) market.

Designed to interconnect multiple data centres within a metro area, Waverserver will allow cloud, Internet content providers and data centre providers to quickly scale bandwidth and support high-speed data transfer, virtual machine migration, and disaster recovery and backup between data centres.

Silicon photonics just took a significant step closer to commercial reality. IBM has announced that its silicon photonics development has reached a significant milestone, which will soon allow the technology to move into production.

IBM engineers have designed and tested a silicon photonics chip that will enable manufacturing of 100Gb/s optical transceivers to improve connectivity inside data centres. This will allow data centres to offer greater data rates between servers and switches to boost bandwidth for cloud computing applications.

Telstra has set a new world record – certified by Guinness World Records – for the longest un-regenerated terrestrial fibre-optic link, covering a distance of 10,358km (6,436 miles) between Perth and Melbourne.

Telstra has already integrated the link into its core network, running 100Gb/s services over the low-latency optical connection from Sydney to Perth, with an extension from Sydney to Melbourne that is capable of 200Gb/s per wavelength.

Partners in the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) project have successfully deployed a router based on open source software in Australia and used it to exchange information with another router located in the US.

The trial represents an important milestone because it shows that software-defined networking (SDN) based routing can work on a global scale, says Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

Infinera has teamed up with Arista Networks to deliver scalable metro and regional cloud networking technology that combines high-performance data centre switching with high-capacity optical transport.

The technology partnership will see Arista integrate its 7000 Series switching portfolio with Infinera’s Cloud Xpress platform to deliver an interoperable system designed to suit the requirements of the data centre and cloud networking markets.

Scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated what may be an important step towards the next generation of computing and data centre interconnect technology. The team established a method to integrate silicon photonic chips with the processor in the same package, avoiding the need for optical transceiver assemblies.

The new technique, which was presented on 25 March at this year's OFC in Los Angeles, California, could lower the cost and increase the performance, energy efficiency and size of future data centres, supercomputers and cloud-based systems.