OpenOptics MSA Consortium Releases WDM Spec for DCI

The OpenOptics MSA Consortium has published the first foundational Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) specification for an interoperable 100G WDM standard for 2 kilometer reach, addressing data center interconnect (DCI) requirements.

RANOVUS said this new WDM specification brings together 1550nm WDM laser and silicon photonics for QSFP and optical engine based solutions, enabling lowest-cost, highest density, and highest bandwidth with single mode fiber pair connectivity, to enable data centers to use up to 32 or more channels per fiber strand.

“Our OpenOptics MSA collaboration with industry leaders has resulted in the definition of a foundational WDM specification for data center network connectivity, and having terabit scalability on a single mode fiber pair infrastructure,” said Saeid Aramideh, chief marketing and sales officer for RANOVUS.  “The availability of this specification is a major milestone for our industry which we believe will not only accelerate the adoption of silicon-photonics based WDM solutions for the data center market, but also allow for a scalable terabit infrastructure for next generation datacenter architectures.”

“Previously, there was no standard for anything beyond 100Gbs,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Now, the industry will have an architecture standard that scales to a terabit and beyond on existing fiber, substantially reduces the cost of hyperscale data center networks.”

http://www.ranovus.com

Earlier this month, the OpenOptics Multi-Source Agreement group said it plans to contribute its developed wavelength specifications to the Open Compute Project (OCP). The new specification enables data to be streamed at terabits per second over a single fiber.

The founders and supporters for the OpenOptics MSA for Highly Scalable Interconnect Solutions include Mellanox Technologies, RANOVUS, Ciena, Oracle, Vertilas, and Ghiasi Quantum. The MSA combines 1550 nm WDM laser and silicon photonics for optical networking solutions enabling the lowest cost, highest density, and highest bandwidth single mode fiber (SMF) connectivity, significantly improving terabit-scale data center infrastructure ROI.

http://www.openopticsmsa.org/