Alcatel-Lucent offers metro-focused 1830 PSS enhancements

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) has expanded its 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) line to better address emerging metro and data center interconnect requirements. The company has announced new versions of the PSS-4 and PSS-16 variants of the 1830 PSS and has introduced the mid-sized PSS-8. All three platforms now feature a distributed switching architecture as well as 200-Gbps per slot capacity.

The upgrade includes the introduction of four new line cards; each contains switching capabilities, thus creating a distributed switching architecture. The design reduces system footprint and enables a pay-as-you grow switch fabric design, according to Alcatel-Lucent's Kevin Drury. The single-slot line cards include a 12-port x 10-Gbps transponder/switchponder, 100G/200G rate adaptive uplink card, ROADM card, and a 20-port x 10-Gbps multi-rate, multi-protocol multiplexer.

The cards enable the new PSS-4 and PSS-16 variants to support twice the capacity as the previous generation, while offering a 50% savings in footprint and a 40% savings in power. The new PSS-8, meanwhile, will offer 800-Gbps of capacity via four slots in a 3RU footprint. Alcatel-Lucent positions the environmentally hardened system for metro access and aggregation applications. Taken together, the systems can offer scale from 400 Gbps to 1.6 Tbps.

All three systems will accept cards from the previous PSS-4 and PSS-16. However, presently fielded PSS-4 and PSS-16 chassis will not accept the new cards, as the chassis are not engineered to support the distributed switching architecture.

In addition to meeting more conventional metro requirements, Drury says the new capabilities enable the 1830 PSS family to compete with newly minted offerings targeted at the SDN-enabled data center interconnect space such as Infinera's Cloud Xpress, Cyan's N-Series, and Coriant's 7100 Pico (see "Infinera ships Cloud Xpress platform," "Cyan makes data center interconnect play with N-Series," and "Coriant offers metro edge version of 7100 packet optical transport platform").

The new capabilities should be released this spring.

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