ROY RUBENSTEIN TELCOS
Bon voyage: Coriant, Facebook and Telecom Infra Project are developing the Voyager (pictured here), a converged transponder and IP/MPLS white box solution.
Telcos
look anew at network design
D evelopments in telecom services are causing service providers to rethink how they architect their networks. So claims Uwe Fischer, CTO at Coriant. Fischer cites how the growth of high- capacity video and 4G mobile services are placing challenging capacity requirements on the network. There are also low latency requirements for emerging applications such as driverless cars that need specific networking functions placed close to the user.
“If it was a pure transport box the input rate would equal the output rate but because it is a packet box, you can take advantage of layer 2 over-subscription,” says Niall Robinson, vice president, global business development at Adva. Adva Optical Networking is backing Voyager because it does not have a packet-optical platform in its product portfolio. “We are enabling ourselves to play in the packet-optical space with a self-contained box,” says Robinson. Coriant does have its own packet-optical platforms. Its interest is in Voyager’s role as a router.“ To support the telecom use cases, it is very much about putting software on top of the hardware and that is exactly our contribution,” said Fischer.
ROY RUBENSTEIN
Transformation of design and operation of next-gen networks is underway as vendors and service providers
“A lot of the classical telcos are challenged by this new network
environment and it is driving people to rethink the way they want to build their networks,” says Fischer. It has led some telecom operators to explore how the Internet content providers build their networks, with their use of open-source software and disaggregated white-box platforms. Some operators are even collaborating with the Internet content players. One example is Facebook working with ten operators as part of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). TIP has over 300 members including systems vendors, component makers and contract manufacturers. TIP has created seven working group projects across three network segments: access, backhaul, and core and management. One of the TIP projects, part of backhaul, is the Open Optical Packet Transport, which has unveiled its first platform: a white-box packet-optical platform dubbed Voyager. VOYAGER Voyager is a one-rack-unit box designed by Facebook, with the specification made available to TIP members. Voyager is based on Facebook’s Wedge top-of-rack switch designed for the data centre and which is now being made by several contract manufacturers. Each Wedge switch can be customised based on the operating system used and the applications loaded. The goal is to adopt a similar approach for Voyager. Companies backing Voyager include Acacia Communications, Broadcom and
Coriant points out that dedicated IP routers with its layer 4 and above
capabilities will still be used in the network but the combination of a router platform like Voyager coupled with higher-layer functionality that is moving from specialised platforms to servers running software- defined networking and virtualised network functions, operators now have an alternative architectural approach. “It is how we see the packet network will be done in future with people moving away from classical IP routers and using such packet-forwarding switches, ” says Fischer. SIGNIFICANCE Adva’s Robinson is confident Voyager will be a cost-competitive platform and points to the open-source software community developing its feature set. Robinson, a 25-year industry veteran, describes TIP as one of the most ambitious and creative projects he has been involved in. “ It is less around the design of the box,” says Robinson. “It is the shaking up of the ecosystem, that is what TIP is about.” Fischer believes TIP is an example of a growing momentum among operators for change. Voyager, for example, may not be adopted everywhere and may start with greenfield deployments but the alternative of continuing to evolve existing networking systems only leads to more complexity. “I think the time has come where continuing the way we have done in the past will most likely not lead us to success,” says Fischer.
strive to cope with soaring demands.
Lumentum, which are involved in the platform’s hardware design. Snaproute is delivering the software inside the box while first units are being made by the contract manufacturer, Celestica. Two systems vendors, Coriant and Adva Optical Networking, are also involved. Adva will provide a sales channel for Voyager and is interfacing it to its network management system. The system vendor will also provide services and software support. Coriant is bringing its switching and routing expertise to Voyager as well as its dense WDM open line system. Voyager is already being trialled by operators and is expected to ship from April. SPECIFICATION At the core of Voyager is the Broadcom StrataXGS Tomahawk, a 3.2-terabit switch chip that is also used in the Wedge switch. The Tomahawk features 128 x 25 Gbit/s serialiser-deserialiser (SerDes) to enable 32 x 100-gigabit ports and supports layer 2 switching and layer 3 routing. Voyager uses 12, 100 Gigabit Ethernet client-side pluggable interfaces and two Acacia AC -400 5x7-inch modules for a total of 800 gigabits of line-side capacity.
16
| ISSUE 8 | Q1 2017
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker