Cyan upgrades Z-Series platforms, adds SDN APIs to Blue Planet

Cyan (NYSE: CYNI) has announced a series of enhancements for its Z-Series packet-optical transport platforms (P-OTPs) primarily aimed at strengthening their metro and Carrier Ethernet 2.0 capabilities. It also has unveiled new application programmable interfaces (APIs) for its Blue Planet software-defined networking (SDN) platform, including one designed specifically for enabling optical services.

On the hardware side, the Z-Series systems now support MPLS-TP, a capability that Cyan Chief Marketing Officer Joe Cumello told Lightwave was added in response to demand from customers in Asia (particularly China) and the Europe/Middle East/Africa region. The MPLS-TP support complements the Z-Series’ existing PBB-TE capabilities to provide carriers with greater flexibility in support of connection-oriented Ethernet, added Abel Tong, director of solutions marketing at Cyan.

Meanwhile, the Z-Series now offers hitless software upgrades and new traffic policing and shaping capabilities that enhance multilevel service provision. Cyan sees the hitless upgrade ability as a differentiator versus typical Ethernet switch/routers. The traffic policing and shaping features enable the creation of ingress and egress bandwidth profiles and enable better bandwidth use for sub-rate services, Tong said.

The systems also will support coherent 100-Gbps transmission via the use of CFP optical transceivers. The current release offers one 100-Gbps interface per line card. However, the slots are engineered to support 200 Gbps, and Cumello said that Cyan expects to use that full capacity at some point in the future.

Rounding out the hardware upgrades are an eight-degree, 96-channel ROADM card that complements Cyan’s previous single-slot two- and four-degree ROADM cards as well as new integrated EDFA modules (one each for metro and long-haul applications). The new ROADM card offers flexible-grid capabilities for future support of optical transmissions at 400 Gbps and above.

In the SDN realm, Cyan has released four new APIs: Optical Services, SNMP Trap Forwarding, Physical and Logical Inventory, and Site Manager. All provide northbound interfaces between an SDN controller and the Blue Planet SDN ecosystem. The Cyan spokespeople revealed that NTT America is using the Optical Service API and Blue Planet to provision 10-Gbps wavelengths in its network.

Most of the new capabilities are all part of Release 6.0, which Cyan made available in August. The exception is the MPLS-TP support; Cyan is currently showing this to customers in lab settings. Cyan expects to release the MPLS-TP feature in the first quarter of next year.

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