Polatis Series 7000 optical circuit switch offers 384x384 ports

Optical switches developer Polatis has introduced an all-optical cross-connect that it asserts offers the highest port count available. The Polatis Series 7000 Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) sports 384x384 fiber ports and offers fully non-blocking all-optical matrix switching, the company says.

The system fits into 4RU of rack height, which Polatis says enables the Series 7000 of offer 20% more capacity in 40% less space than alternatives.

The Series 7000 leverages the company's patented DirectLight optical switch technology, which enables rapid reconfiguration of any or all paths in milliseconds while consuming as much energy as a lightbulb, Polatis says.

"In response to customer demand, we have doubled the maximum matrix size available from our DirectLight technology while maintaining leading-edge optical performance," said Nick Parsons, chief technology officer at Polatis. "With the addition of the new Series 7000 to the Polatis product family, we can now offer our customers the broadest range of high performance dynamic fiber cross-connect solutions together with open, programmable interfaces to meet the changing needs of today's software-defined networks."

The OCS can route more than 3.7 Pbps of optical traffic, based on 9.6 Tbps on each fiber. It also comes with such featuers as optical power monitoring, variable attenuation, and autonomous optical layer protection switching.

Polatis expects the Series 7000 to find use for virtualization and remote provisioning of fiber resources in telecom and data center networks. To this end, the system features carrier-class embedded control interfaces to enable integration with any software-defined network (SDN) controller. The OCS supports open SDN protocols, including embedded OpenFlow, NETCONF, and RESTCONF agents.

Polatis recently announced a partnership with Quali to integrate its OCS platforms, including the Polatis 7000 OCS, with cloud orchestration software. The result enables the new system to support automated fiber layer provisioning and deployment at scale of system integration test suites (see "Polatis, Quali partner for automated fiber layer management for fiber-optic testing").

"The combination of the new Series 7000 and its software feature set enables flexible, dynamic optical networks at scale," said Gerald Wesel, CEO at Polatis. "Through dynamic resource allocation, operational costs for truck rolls and manual patching are virtually eliminated, service quality and velocity are increased, and server utilization in data centers is dramatically improved."

The Polatis 7000 OCS is commercially available.

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