CALIENT Technologies, the global leader for optical circuit-switching technology, Wednesday announced a new plugin for the OpenDayLight (ODL) platform, giving data center architects flexibility in building software-defined networking (SDN)-controlled hybrid packet-optical networks using the company’s S-Series Optical Circuit Switches. The new plugin works with the “Hydrogen” release of OpenDaylight and will be upgraded to support the latest “Helium” Release.
Santa Barbara-based CALIENT said that the new OpenDayLight plugin will allow applications and external controllers using the ODL framework to control CALIENT’s S-Series switches via standard OpenDayLight REST APIs, thus simplifying deployment in software defined data center networks. The ODL plugin builds on CALIENT’s existing support for the OpenFlow API by extending the OpenFlow protocol to support circuit switching. CALIENT had earlier announced OpenFlow (with circuit switching extensions) capabilities on its S-Series optical circuit switches.
According to CALIENT, in future the company will add a circuit manager to OpenDayLight - northbound REST APIs that interfaces with external orchestration engines/controllers that may want to manage CALIENT’s S-series switch as part of their native application.
OpenDayLight provides a very flexible software framework for controlling hybrid packet-optical networks and so it makes sense for CALIENT to pioneer the development of plugin functionality to support optical circuit switches. CALIENT intends to contribute this and future plugins to the open-source community to help harness the power of SDN in data center and metro networks.
- Jitender Miglani, Vice President of Engineering for CALIENT
