Johann Strauss, the business development manager for data center technologies in Europe, said it has offered tunable optics on its transponder-based ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) for the last year and a half. He said it added the capability on its high-end routing platforms, the 12000 Series Gigabit Switch Router, the CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, and the 7600 Series at the beginning of this year.
Those developments were about integrating optical interfaces on to line cards. On the switching side, however, the challenge is different. The reduced size of the components in optical modules such as XENPAK and X2, which jointly represent about 80% of the 10Gb market, present challenges in their own right.
The technology’s there, but it’s not yet mature enough, Strauss said. He said part of the reason it is taking so long for such products to come to market is because they need to be resilient enough to survive for 7-10 years, which is the kind of lifetime optical interfaces need to have, so we have very narrow specs.
He said tunability only makes sense on 10Gb interfaces like XENPAK or X2 (the other alternatives in the market include XFP and Quake’s SFP+). For GbE and 2Gb, it’s really only for point-to-point links, he said.
The ability to tune the optics on its devices, including the Ethernet switches, is key to Cisco’s overall optical strategy of integrating intelligence into the end systems, with transponder functionality embedded into the interfaces, and making the latter tunable so as to reduce spare part expense and make optical networking more flexible.
Integrated optics in the end systems means you get the intelligence to see signal degradation or movement, enabling them to react before it dies, failing over to another interface, which is a capability called hitless failover, Strauss said. Once the tunable optics are in place, he said the next thing will be to link them to the reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer [ROADM] so that a company will be able to change the wavelength of the bandwidth coming into the ROADM and switch it to another channel, in a couple of seconds, whereas with our competitors it takes a couple of weeks.
