Calient Technologies launched, at the recent OFC 2018 event, its Edge|640, a new optical circuit switch with 640 fibre-optic cross connections – up to twice the capacity of the company's existing S320 OCS.
The Edge|640 was developed for data centre, telecommunication and test laboratory applications in response to growing device counts and the need – due to network virtualisation – for increased connectivity. Key applications include wireless network radio-to-baseband units; test lab automation shared test resources and data centre GPU, FPGA and storage compute clusters.
The switch is organised into two switching groups of 320 ports each. Devices connected to a switch port on one of the switch groups can be connected to a device on any of the ports in the other switch group. This connectivity is suited to ‘wire-once’ network applications or testing applications where devices under test need access to a range of test systems.
Leveraging the company’s 3d micro-electrical machine optical mirror technology, the Edge|640 is transparent to data speed and is protocol agnostic, enabling the switch to support optical connections up to 400Gb/s. The all-optical nature of the switch results in very low latency connections and it features built-in optical signal power monitoring on each link and low power consumption of 90W typical.
David Altstaetter, Calient vice president of product line management, explained at the show that the switch had been ‘very well received.’ He said of the launch: ’Some of the largest networks in the world trust Calient Optical Circuit Switch technology. The proven nature of technology sets the stage for the Edge|640 to be used in very high-density mission-critical applications.’