Last week at OFC 2014 in San Francisco, optical transport systems provider Coriant took the wraps off of the mTera Universal Transport Platform. The platform is designed to be flexible and dense enough to support a wide range of packet optical transport applications, including metro-to-long-haul gateway applications and on-demand data center connectivity.
The new platform is the first from Coriant since the merger with Tellabs (see “Marlin Equity Partners reshuffles executive deck ahead of Coriant, Tellabs merger”). The company asserts the mTera features compact, simplified, and efficient traffic grooming based on Tellabs’ expertise along with Coriant’s photonic-layer technology and system performance. It also leverages Coriant’s new Dynamic Optical Cloud service enablement software capabilities to provide service agility in an open network environment and lower opex and capex.
Coriant identifies the following as key features of the mTera platform:
- The support of 7 TB of switching capacity in half a rack; with two shelves supported per bay, this equates to 14 TB of total switching capacity. The system features 14 service slots and 6 switch fabric slots. The mTera initially will feature 200G cards, but 500G cards will be available in the future, Coriant asserts.
- The platform‘s multiservice switching architecture supports both OTN and Layer 2 switching across every card and every port on the platform, Corian says. The full complement of ODUx switching including ODU-0 grooming with ODU-Flex, Carrier Ethernet, and MPLS-TP. All interface cards are designed using pluggable interfaces: SFP+ optical transceivers for 10G and CFP optical modules for 100G, including 100G coherent DWDM. All interfaces support a variety of "white light" and DWDM options, Coriant says.
- Despite the high degree of flexibility and wide range of features, including unrestricted OTN and packet switching on every port, the variety of interface cards has been kept to a minimum, Coriant says. This simplifies ordering, sparing, and deployment
- Coriant says it also has designed the mTera for maximum resiliency. This includes providing restoration coordination across multiple layers – redundancy in the switching fabrics, interface modules, power supply, and processors. At the network level, the resiliency includes integration of ASON/GMPLS control plane and software-defined network (SDN) functions for end-to-end, multilayer capabilities.
“Coriant has used its newly combined resources to build the mTera transport platform which is well defined with the right optical, OTN and Packet switching capabilities,” said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst, optical for Infonetics Research. “The platform is also designed with SDN in mind in order to meet the evolving requirements of an on-demand, elastic network.”
“Hypergrowth driven by mobility, video, and cloud applications continues to drive the need for new and innovative infrastructure solutions,” added Pat DiPietro, Coriant’s CEO. “We continue to make strategic investments in Coriant’s portfolio to ensure our customers have the tools necessary to adapt to these dynamic market changes. The addition of mTera to our product portfolio strengthens Coriant’s leadership in end-to-end packet optical networking while enabling service providers to cost-effectively meet the performance requirements of today’s demanding transport applications.”
Coriant says the mTera platform is currently available and in trials with customers.
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