Israeli optical transport vendor ECI Telecom has introduced the 400G flexible grid blade for its Apollo packet-optical product platform.
The 400G blade is designed to transport data with higher spectral efficiency and port density, resulting in reduced rack space and lower power consumption, the company says.
The blade enables carriers to configure a mix of 10G, 40G and 100G on the client side, and to choose the required speed and reach combination on the line side. This flexibility provides greater efficiency and reduced cost of ownership – which makes it particularly suited to service providers and data centre operators, the company asserts.
Using the 400G blade, customers will be able to transport more than twice the information within the same spectrum while reducing the power consumption to less than 0.75W per Gb/s. This is a major reduction, even in comparison to ECI’s already low power cards.
Jimmy Mizrahi, head of ECI’s portfolio business lines, said: “The evolution to rates beyond 100G is required to support continued traffic growth. With the 400G blade, not only is ECI improving the transmission rate of the fibre by two, we are actually further increasing the spectral efficiency by 33 per cent with the use of flex grid."
With the 400G blade, the allocation of transmission rate and spectrum are fully flexible and can be determined by service, preference or distance. In fact, ECI Telecom says the same blades can be used in the metro as well as in the long–haul, delivering additional operational efficiencies.
Choice of appropriate transmission rate is achieved through integrated OSNR monitoring which optimises the rate to channel conditions. In a software-defined networking (SDN) environment, this capability can also be used to automatically adapt to dynamic traffic patterns, the company adds.
ECI will be introducing its 400G blade at WDM and Next Generation Optical Networking in Nice, France, on 22 – 25 June, booth #11.