The OIF has Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) projects coming and going as a result of its recent Q2 2022 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting. The organization released a Common Management Interface Specification Implementation Agreement, then launched a follow-on effort.
A significant part of the OIF’s demo area at OFC 2022 in San Diego this past March, CMIS provides a way to initialize and manage optical and copper modules that is standard yet provides room for custom functionality. The approach makes it easier to integrate such modules into different systems from multiple vendors. Launched as part of the QSFP-DD Multi-Source Agreement, CMIS expansion began a transition to OIF early this year (see “OIF takes over QSFP-DD CMIS Common Management Interface Specification development”). The new Implementation Agreement represents version 5.2 of the specification set and marks the completion of this transition.
“One of the reasons OIF adopted the CMIS work is its close coupling and application to ongoing OIF projects,” said Ian Alderdice of Ciena, an OIF Physical & Link Layer Working Group – Management co-vice chair. “This IA includes new features supporting a wide variety of form factors, most importantly Fibre Channel enhancements which expands the range of end-user applications.”
Along these lines, the new project will seek to enable the application of CMIS to co-packaged optics and external lasers as well as link training, leveraging OIF’s work within the External Laser Small Form Factor Pluggable (ELSFP) project. “This new project work represents the next steps in the evolution of CMIS and its alignment with other OIF PLL Working Groups tracks to enable an interoperable ecosystem,” explained Gary Nicholl of Cisco, who is OIF PLL Working Group – Management co-vice chair and OIF secretary/treasurer.
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