Sycamore Debuts 2.5tbps Multiservice Switching Platform

Sycamore Networks Inc. today announced the SN 16000 MC-1024, which delivers 2.5 terabits per second of core optical switching capacity in a small footprint (three bays) to deliver gigabit Ethernet (GigE), 10GigE, SONET and SDH.

The offer doubles the capacity of Sycamore’s previous system.

“Today, customers have maxed out their capacity at network nodes and the 1.25-terabit level,” said Kevin Oye, vice president of systems and technology at Sycamore. “They have a real demand to scale to 1024 [OC48s].”

The SN 16000 MC-1024 supports up to 1,024 OC-48/STM-16 ports, 256 OC-192/STM-64 ports, 1,280GigE ports and 128 10GigE ports.

“While in the past people were concerned about what was the ultimate capacity in a node, it’s now become proven that they need a lot of capacity and they don’t want to buy it up front,” said Oye. “They want to buy into a platform that allows them to scale at each network node as demand evolves.”

Leveraging the same service interface cards as other Sycamore multichassis (MC) systems, the SN 16000 MC-1024 enables customers with deployments of the MC-512, a 1.2 terabits per second switching node to double system capacity in the same footprint and without disruption to existing traffic.

“This is an extension of our vision to bring dynamic routing protocols to the optical layers,” said Oye. “It’s leveraging the architecture of the family, but we can essentially double the capacity and do an in-service upgrade within the existing footprint.”

The alternative to this approach, he said, is to mesh together two 640GB switches by interconnecting them with trunks.

“You have to make sure every port in every chassis can get to every other port in every other chassis,” he said. “So, you basically have to put in a lot of intertrunk traffic between these nodes and it ends up being an inefficient and costly way to scale.”

Sycamore Networks Inc. www.sycamorenet.com

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