400GbE services available on Southern Cross NEXT cable
SX Team celebrating the SX NEXT installation (Image credit: Southern Cross)
Australasia-based international capacity provider Southern Cross Cables now has availability of commercial 400GbE services on its Southern Cross NEXT cable, between Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
According to Laurie Miller, CEO at Southern Cross, these are believed to be the region’s first international 400GbE services, as well as the longest single system data-centre to data-centre 400GbE services. He says: “With the Southern Cross NEXT cable system, the new technology and capability has been designed to support the rising demand for bandwidth driven by cloud adoption and digitisation. We are now thrilled to be able to offer 400GbE Layer 1 services as the first of several planned innovations taking advantage of the Southern Cross eco-system, and the new NEXT cable.”
Miller adds that the availability of 400GbE services will allow customers hyper-scale low-latency connectivity directly between data-centres in Sydney and Los Angeles, with a new Auckland DC PoP due for implementation in 2023. He adds: “Demand for 100G+ high-capacity links has been booming in recent years particularly for data-centre to data-centre GCN connectivity, where extremely large and resilient volumes of data are required to traverse core network infrastructure for data replication, data storage connectivity and disaster recovery. An application where the Southern Cross multi-path eco-system excels.”
The 400GbE service runs on Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics and is managed by the Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. To accommodate increasing and changing network traffic demands, Southern Cross’s eco-system also incorporates Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 platforms, providing the ability to deploy services from 100Mbs now up to 400GbE connectivity over applicable wavelengths.
Ivan Polizzi, Regional Managing Director, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands for Ciena, says: “With such a flexible and scalable network foundation from Ciena, Southern Cross is able to target the growing demands of today’s networks and provide customers with unrivalled connectivity by way of applications such as 400GbE services.”
400GbE services will be available directly from Southern Cross and through its participating resale channel partners.
