ROADM makes Multi-site DCI scale seemlessly

Open Compute Platform (OCP) has focused on disaggregation of functions within the Data Center and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is looking at breaking up transport f …

Open Compute Platform (OCP) has focused on disaggregation of functions within the Data Center and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is looking at breaking up transport functions within the telecom infrastructure to make them cheaper and laser-specific. The transport Industry started the use of disaggregated solutions with the delivery of the Transponder blade or pizza box that has simple interfaces for programming and provisioning. In point to point configurations with simple WDM mux/demuxes in a small form factor; this has worked well to scale bandwidth with traffic flows. But what happens when there are more than two sites that one needs to distribute traffic between and also scale that traffic. Does the network need to change to support this situation? Instead of replicating and transporting content between two sites (simple) we need to replicate the traffic from each site to multiple sites or move content to a specific site from all sites in a given metropolitan region. We also still need to share content only between two of these multitude of sites. This will take multiple sets of fiber pairs and mux/demuxes and dedicated transponder boxes. It is time to take the next step and look at functions beyond the basics of point to point configurations, as Data Center Metro networks extend across multiple locations with traffic that is ubiquitous and more meshy.