Optical systems vendor Infinera has expanded its Cloud Xpress family of metro cloud platforms, designed to address the needs of cloud service providers, Internet content providers, Internet Exchange service providers, large enterprises and other large-scale data centre operators. This release adds a new Cloud Xpress platform with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) client services in the same compact form factor along with enhanced functionality.
The Cloud Xpress family, which first started shipping in December 2014, leverages the oPIC-500 optical engine, Infinera’s metro-optimised photonic integrated circuit, to deliver DWDM data centre interconnect services up to 500Gb/s in a compact two-rack-unit chassis. The new Cloud Xpress with 100 GbE extends the hyper-scale density, simplified operations and low power of the existing Cloud Xpress family that operators can use to easily deploy and scale their networks. With the addition of the new platform, the Cloud Xpress family now supports 10 GbE, 40 GbE and 100 GbE client-side interfaces to match customer-specific requirements.
Along with the introduction of the new Cloud Xpress with 100 GbE, Infinera announced important enhancements to the Cloud Xpress family. NETCONF and YANG support for software defined networking (SDN) enables smooth integration into data centre automation and management systems, including; LLDP protocol awareness for auto-discovery of adjacent switches and routers across the WAN supports efficient connectivity validation and troubleshooting, and MACsec provides end-to-end encryption to keep data secure. Together, these features of the Cloud Xpress enhance ease of use in data centre environments.
“100 GbE is finally becoming available on data centre switches and achieving cost effective pricing on routers – creating an emerging demand for 100 GbE client-side interfaces on optical equipment designed for metro data centre interconnect,” said Andrew Schmitt, research director, carrier transport networking at IHS. “Infinera is shipping 10 GbE and 40 GbE; adding 100 GbE is a well-timed extension to the Cloud Xpress family, and helps it retain a leadership position in this emerging product category.”
“As Cloud and application enterprise adoption accelerates, our customers increasingly rely upon Equinix to meet their growing bandwidth demands,” said Teri Francis, vice president of technology at Equinix. “Infinera’s Cloud Xpress is a Cloud-optimised platform offering the highest density and terabit scalability to interconnect our data centres while maintaining a very low power footprint. This enables our customers to access cloud and network nodes between data centres across the metro with high performance and great efficiency. The new 100-Gbps interfaces will definitely expand the potential applications for Cloud Xpress.”