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Cloud Xpress on its way!

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Krishna Mukherjee
New Update

By Krishna Mukherjee

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As network operators move into the terabit era, they increasingly face the problems of high-speed broadband connectivity, data explosion and so on… To address their needs, Infinera has introduced its first cloud-labeled product, Cloud Xpress

After marking its presence in the long-haul space with products such as DTN-X, optical transmission equipment maker Infinera is eyeing the metro cloud market with the launch of Cloud Xpress, which would be available in the market by December 2014.

The carriers increasingly face the problems of high-speed broadband connectivity, data explosion, among others, in their cloud journey but Infinera claims that with its new solutions network operators will be able to deploy high-capacity transport networks across the metro and around the world.

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Connecting to the cloud means that some of the data the end users want has to be accessed from thousands of miles away and all of this increases traffic between data centers as well as between customers and the cloud providers.

Cloud Xpress is optimized for the metro cloud, the transport network that interconnects multiple data centers within a metro area, and aims to provide point-to-point hyper-scale bandwidth over distances of up to 200 km without amplification.

The product also comes on the back of surveys indicating that the cloud network space will represent 24% of the total $18 bn optical market by 2019 and metro cloud market will touch $3 bn by 2019.

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According to Vinay Rathore, senior director of solutions marketing at Infinera, the hyper-scale cloud operators building data centers will require a numbers of 100G connections between their metro data centers. With the rise in cloud applications and services, the need for high-speed data center interconnection has been felt and the Cloud Xpress is designed with that in view.

“As cloud adoption increases, large network operators are reporting a magnification effect on incoming traffic, such that a single request from an end user can generate 10 times the amount of traffic between data centers than was contained in the request,” the company said.

The product simplifies the deployment of high-bandwidth connections while lowering the power and space required-to-scale metro cloud networks. It delivers one terabit per second (Tb/s) of input and output capacity in just two rack units (RU) with up to 500 gigabits per second (Gb/s) of line-side capacity and a mix of 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 40 GbE and 100 GbE client- side interfaces, the company said.

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For network operators that need to scale the metro cloud in the least amount of space, the Cloud Xpress offers 21 Tb/s of input and output capacity per 42 RU rack.

The product is designed with a rack-and-stack form factor and a new software that enables it to plug into existing cloud provisioning systems using open SDN APIs.

Meanwhile, Infinera also announced upgrades to the Infinera DTN-X packet optical network transport platform with the Packet Switching Module (PXM) for Carrier Ethernet and MPLS, theses moves indicate its continued investment in the long-haul market and intelligent transport networks for service providers around the world.

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Infinera will also offer new metro-aggregation capabilities for the DTN-X in 2015.

The Cloud Xpress leverages attributes of the DTN-X, including the 500-Gbps photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and Instant Bandwidth technology, to extract 1 Tbps of input/output capacity into a 2 RU package. The instant bandwidth feature enables operators to access the 500-Gbps capacity of each PIC incrementally.

“ICPs networks combined with growing budgets for networking hardware create an opportunity for equipment purpose-built for the metro cloud. With the Cloud Xpress, Infinera is applying its proven in-house photonic integration technology to meet these new requirements with a unique system for customers who have large-scale data center interconnect needs,” says Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst, carrier transport networking at Infonetics Research.

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The company expects that its new line of business would help it gain market share. It reported a 43.4% jump in its Q2 revenues at $165.4 mn this year and is growing at a rate of 24% YoY.

It has 46 customers around the world and counts Pacnet, Vodafone, Cox, Telefonica, Zayo and Internap as its major customers.

“The introduction of the Cloud Xpress for the metro cloud shows that Infinera is again bringing the right 100 Gb/s solution to market at the right time, marking our initial entry into the rapidly growing metro transport market with a unique solution for cloud data center interconnection,” says Tom Fallon, CEO at Infinera.

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