Polatis to Demonstrate SDN-enabled Optical Circuit Switching

Polatis, in partnership with the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol, will host a live demonstration of a hybrid packet/optical circuit switched software-defined network (SDN) at next week's European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in London.

The demo will showcase hybrid packet-optical circuit switching architectures for dynamic management of large flows in data center applications such as virtual machine migration.

Polatis said its series 6000 optical cross-connect offers an embedded OpenFlow interface, enabling seamless integration with SDN control planes. The Polatis Series 6000 OCS adds transparent, flexible, dark fibre connectivity for up to 192x192 fibre ports with less than 1dB typical loss and negligible impact on transmission budgets.

"We are excited about the close collaboration with the University of Bristol, which has allowed us to accelerate our technology developments to support the emerging SDN market," said Gerald Wesel, CEO Polatis, Inc. "Our customer response to the Series 6000 in the last twelve months has been phenomenal. The addition of SDN support across our full product range brings dynamic optical layer connectivity with outstanding performance to the software-defined datacentre".

"Unified software control of the physical layer is a key requirement for next generation networks", said Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, Head of the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol. "Adding SDN support to Polatis optical circuit switches brings dynamic reconfigurability to optical systems and enables us to explore new programmable architectures for efficient, high capacity, telecom and datacentre networks."

OpenFlow is an emerging standard for SDN which can be used to control optical circuit switch (OCS) elements for applications such as router bypass for high capacity data centres, management of dark fibre network connectivity and advanced colourless, directionless and contention-less architectures.

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