CALIENT Technologies announced a new plugin for the OpenDayLight (ODL) platform for providing programmatic control of it S-Series optical circuit switches. This builds on CALIENT’s existing support for the OpenFlow API by extending the OpenFlow protocol to support circuit switching.
CALIENT's hybrid packet-optical platform adds an optical circuit switch to packet-based data center networks specifically to handle offloading of persistent data flows through express optical-layer paths. The company said its new OpenDayLight plugin will allow applications and external controllers using the ODL framework to control CALIENT’s S-Series switches via standard published OpenDayLight REST APIs, thus simplifying deployment in software defined data center networks.
“OpenDayLight provides a very flexible software framework for controlling hybrid packet-optical networks and so it makes sense for CALIENT to pioneer the development of plugin functionality to support optical circuit switches,” said Jitender Miglani, Vice President of Engineering for CALIENT. “CALIENT intends to contribute this and future plugins to the open-source community to help harness the power of SDN in data center and metro networks.”
In a future release, CALIENT will add a circuit manager to OpenDayLight. Circuit manager is a service with northbound REST APIs that interfaces with external orchestration engines/controllers that may want to manage CALIENT’s S-series switch as part of their native application.
