Meriton Integrates OXC into ROADM-Enabled Optical Switch

Meriton Networks Inc. announced this week it has integrated an optical cross-connect system into Release 4 of its 7200 OADX optical switching platform, adding STS-1/VC-4 grooming to its existing ROADM and transparent wavelength switching capabilities.

“What it does is collapse … the ROADM interface, transparent wavelength switching, WDM interfaces and now the SONET and SDH grooming – all inside one shelf, inside one network element,” says Rob Gaudet, Meriton’s director of product management.

“What we have always had since day one is a transparent switch fabric where we can switch wavelengths at any protocol or bit rate from 100Mbps up to 2.7Gbps and we support 10Gbps interfaces. This will be a new variant on that card that will have a full 320Gbps non-blocking switch fabric on it for STS-1 and VC-4. What that enables us to do then is within that single chassis we can terminate SONET or SDH circuits at the same time as performing transparent OADM-type functions.”

In contrast to ADM-on-a-card or ADM-on-a-wave solutions, a non-blocking architecture provides “any wavelength to any wavelength” grooming, says Gaudet. “With an ADM on a wavelength, you are coming in on a West side and going out East, and all you can do is drop and add. If you want to connect multiple rings or a mesh, you would be cabling transponder cards together or putting multiple boxes back to back in order to simulate what we can do though an integrated switch fabric,” he says.

Gaudet adds the new release takes advantage of the latest advancement in electronics. “You won’t see this anywhere else – 320Gbps in half a rack,” he says, explaining that the current generation of optical cross-connects is fairly large. “They were built in the late ‘90s or so and take several racks to provide similar levels of switching capacity [as the Meriton 7200 OADX wherein a single chip does 320Gbps]. That would have required many shelves.”

The miniaturization is key to collapsing functions. “What we can do in half a rack would easily have taken several bays to do patch paneling between them all.”

In addition, he says, previous optical cross-connect required truck rolls every time you want to make a change. “With our product, we can provide a flexible manageable system that can be remotely provisioned,” he says.

The product does not require carriers to change out cards. Traffic can be switch transparently or over SONET interfaces without changing the equipment. “If you are running an OC48 now, if you change it to a GigE, it’s a remote function to change it. There is no truck roll, no change-out of cards,” Gaudet says.

The 7200 OADX Release 4 will be available for testing in fourth quarter.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines