Industry leaders introduce OpenOptics multi-source agreement

RANOVUS Inc. and Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. have announced the founding of an industry consortium to standardize Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) for an interoperable 100G WDM standard for 2 kilometer reach, covering today’s and tomorrow’s large cloud data center interconnectivity requirements. The OpenOptics MSA brings 1550 nm, WDM laser and silicon photonics for QSFP based solutions enabling lowest-cost, highest density, and highest bandwidth single mode fiber (SMF) connectivity to significantly improve terabit scale datacenter infrastructure ROI.

“As the migration of data center network connectivity towards Leaf and Spine architecture accelerates, operators require innovative interconnect solutions to enable a scalable infrastructure at much better economics” said Saeid Aramideh, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer for RANOVUS. “We believe, application of a multi-channel channel laser source, coupled with silicon photonics to enable connectivity in 1550 nm band in QSFP form/factor is a game changer in reducing the data center fiber plant connectivity cost by 4 to 7 times compared to legacy multi-mode fiber implementations.”

The OpenOptics MSA will add additional members to this consortium to achieve a true multi-sourcing supply chain. The key highlights of OpenOptics MSA specification are:
· - 100Gbps, 1550 nm C-band, 4x25Gbps WDM
· - Over a single pair of single mode fiber (SMF)
· - For 2 km reach and beyond
· - Utilizing WDM on the ITU-T grid
· - In a QSFP28 form factor
· - Scalable to higher data rates, 400G and beyond

"Our cloud customers want to deploy data center infrastructure that allow seamless upgrades to interconnect just as they do in server, storage and network hardware.” said Shai Cohen, COO of Mellanox Technologies “With 100G interconnects approaching commercialization in datacenters, OpenOptics MSA brings 100G WDM technology to datacenter economics, density, power consumption, and 2 km link scalability on single mode fiber infrastructure.”

“Data center needs are accelerating. The growth of cloud data centers poses a triple challenge for technology: first, they need 100G sooner than others, but then they also need it to be high-density, low-cost and easy to deploy from the start. Then the third challenge will be that they move on quickly to the next speeds 400G and 1 Tb soon.” said Karen Liu, Principal Analyst with Ovum. “Alignment of industry efforts like OpenOptics MSA will be critical to meet this challenge by bringing WDM and single-mode fiber solutions tailored for data centers.”