CALIENT Debuts LightConnect Fabric Manager Software

CALIENT Technologies introduced its LightConnect Fabric Manager interconnect orchestration software for its S-Series family of Optical Circuit Switches (OCS) for intra-data center connectivity .

The LightConnect orchestration software creates an optical fabric that allows racks or rows of compute resources to be shared between physical Pods across the data center to accommodate varying workload demands.

To enable the OCS-Powered LightConnect Fabric, CALIENT is announcing the new LightConnect Fabric Manager. Core functions of the Fabric Manager include a topology manager and a cross-connect manager. The topology manager maintains a database of the data center network topology including which layer 2/3 switches and ports are connected to specific optical ports on the LightConnect Fabric.

Similarly, the cross-connect manager maintains a complete database of all optical cross connects in the LightConnect Fabric. Together, these two core functions and their databases allow the Fabric Manager to maintain a complete view of overall topology and optical connectivity in the data center.

The Fabric Manager also maintains a consolidated dashboard summary with operational status of all optical circuit switches including alarms, events, and port utilization. The Fabric Manager is a CentOS-based Linux Application, capable of running on off-the-shelf hardware or any virtual machine

“Operational cost efficiency is a compelling competitive advantage in cloud data centers, which makes any innovation that improves compute economics – the biggest contributor to cost – an essential consideration for data center architects and managers,” said Atiq Raza, Chairman and CEO of CALIENT. “Together, the new LightConnect Fabric and Fabric Manager enable a completely new paradigm in data center design and optimization that will support tremendous improvements in server and storage utilization. It is simply not possible to achieve these results with existing layer 2/3 switching solutions, because the round-trip latency of packet-switching is several microseconds every time the hop is made and that is far too great a penalty.”

http://www.calient.net/2015/03/calient-announces-new-lightconnect-fabric-manager-software-to-virtualize-data-center-pods/