CALIENT Technologies introduced a software controller to facilitate dynamic reconfiguration of the optical network layer to handle the “elephant flows” typically caused by data replications, storage migrations, and movements of big data sets in Hadoop distributed file systems. These elephant flows can overflow buffers on conventional packet switches.
CALIENT said its new Optical Topology Management Controller, which built using the OpenDayLight framework, allows efficient optical topologies to be built on demand, optimizing access to compute and storage nodes to achieve maximum utilization of these critical resources. It also lays the foundation for hybrid network fabrics in which CALIENT’s S-Series optical circuit switches augment third-party packet-based networks.
With the addition of traffic analysis and traffic engineering capabilities (planned for early 2015), the controller will support the full hybrid packet-optical network, in which the optical layer is reconfigured dynamically to create optical “express” paths that offload highly persistent traffic flows from the L2/3 packet network.
The new CALIENT controller will be used in conjunction with the company’s S-Series family of optical circuit switches. The S320 flagship is a 320-port optical circuit switch used to create an all-optical network fabric with total throughput of more than 32 terabits per second. The switch allows any-to-any, layer one network connections with almost no latency and can be reconfigured on demand under software control. Each switch port is transparent to bit rate and can support data speeds to 100 Gbps and beyond.
“We’ve seen tremendous customer interest in the powerful value proposition of the dynamically reconfigurable optical layer offered by our S-Series optical circuit switches, but the stumbling block has been the lack of a controller to allow applications and traffic patterns to drive and orchestrate the new topologies,” said Daniel Tardent, Vice President of Marketing at CALIENT. “Our new Optical Topology Management Controller is the missing link and we’re now moving ahead on a number of proof-of-concept deployments with our customers.”
