The joint CALIENT/ADARA solution de-risks the deployment of software-defined network (SDN) Transport Packet Optical Integration (POI) architectures by enabling incremental deployments and accelerates SDN adoption in heterogeneous optical environments' while being vendor and technology agnostic. Deploying ADARA's packet switches and SDN controller and CALIENT's optical circuit switches (OCS) at the edges of MAN/WAN networks and between network and vendor domain boundaries enables service providers and data center operators to virtualize and control all of the disparate resources in their optical transport networks. The CALIENT/ADARA SDN Transport POI Solution delivers dynamic light-path provisioning over the WAN. ADARA's SDN controller and packet switches with Dynamic Link State Protocol (DLSP) provide a real-time performance and policy-based path computation capability to direct packets over the packet layer and optical layer paths. These features reduce opex and capex transparently in heterogeneous environments, deliver near-zero latency for critical services, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Deploying OCS at the network edge has the added benefit of a much larger range of protection scenarios, including 1:N schemes and client-side equipment failure protection (e.g., core router port or transceiver failure). The OCS approach also supports new capabilities such as real-time express path setup in data center interconnect networks for large-scale data migrations. The performance-based packet layer multipath delivers real-time WAN, full use of bisectional bandwidth, and new SLAs.Judge's comment: "High value and flexibility as applied to data centers and WAN and utilizing SDN to optimize resources."Click here to return to the 2016 Lightwave Innovation Reviews page.