Optical switch vendor CALIENT Technologies, Inc. used last week's Optinet China Conference in Beijing to unveil its vision for optical circuit switching in software-defined network (SDN) infrastructures.

According to a presentation delivered at the event by CALIENT Technical Director for Greater China Hongliang Qu, service providers in many instances will find extending the benefits of SDN to their metro and WAN fiber-optic networks a challenge due to the network segmentation the presence of systems from multiple vendors as well as geographic domains will create. However, adding optical circuit switching under SDN control at the network edges and between these network domain boundaries can overcome such obstacles, Qu said. Optical circuit switching provides flexible optical on and off ramps that can link multiple vendor networks and domains and more fully enable the benefits of SDN, Qu asserted.

Any client side resource can be connected to any network resource, which obviates the problems with multivendor incompatibility, Qu said.

CALIENT naturally would prefer the use of its S-Series optical switches in such applications (see, for example, "Calient confirms interoperability of OpenFlow API for S320 optical circuit switch").

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