CALIENT Technologies, the global leader for optical circuit switching technology, has joined the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) to collaborate on expanding the use of optical circuit switching in software defined data centers and metro networks.
CIAN is an engineering research center, funded by the National Science Foundation and comprises 10 universities with the vision of a transformed Internet that would enable end-user access to emerging real time, on-demand network services at data-rates up to 100Gbps.
CALIENT said that it will participate in a range of planned CIAN research activities with the initial phase involving a project to study optical network pre-configuration and recovery during and after disaster scenarios. This is to prepare for major outages in the telecommunications network that can ripple into other networks including the power grid. A second project will see a CALIENT S320 optical circuit switch deployed in Columbia University’s electrical engineering lab for research into software control plane solutions for hybrid packet-optical data center networks.
CALIENT claims that it is pioneering hybrid packet-optical data centers commercially and is already deploying large numbers of optical circuit switches in cloud data centers where the economic and performance benefits are compelling.
Daniel Tardent, Vice President of Marketing at CALIENT
Optical circuit switching offers compelling advantages in today’s cloud data centers and the metro networks that connect them. We’re excited to work with the CIAN team to expand the role of this technology in new network applications.
Dr. Dan Kilper, Administrative Director of CIAN
We welcome CALIENT into our research consortium and look forward to collaborating on next-generation data center and metro network research. We have a strong interest in research that leads to commercially deployable solutions and we believe that we can move quickly with CALIENT to achieve this end. The fact that their high-port-count optical circuit switches are already fully field proven is an important foundation for our collective efforts.
