ADVA Optical Networking launches 100G Metro and built-in encryption

"The security of data has never been so important; its integrity never so public. We're living in a new era of data awareness," said Uli Schlegel, director, data center business development, ADVA Optical Networking. "In the wake of Heartbleed and other data security scares, businesses are only too aware of how vulnerable their mission-critical data is. How susceptible it is to theft and malicious use. Data security is now of paramount importance. At the same time, the volume of data has never been so immense. Transporting and protecting this data requires something purpose built, something special. That's what sets our 100G Metro with built-in encryption technology apart. It's the only product on the market capable of securely transporting big data."

Built upon Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a key size of 256 bits, the ADVA 100G Metro with built-in encryption features a Diffie Hellmann dynamic key exchange with over 60 exchanges per hour. It provides encryption at the lowest network layer and is completely agnostic to protocols such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and Ethernet. It also supports a wide variety of data rates from 5Gbit/s, to 10Gbit/s to 40Gbit/s and onto 100Gbit/s. To ensure compatibility in point-to-point and multi-hop infrastructures, the ADVA 100G Metro with built-in encryption uses optical transport network (OTN) framing. It also adds very little latency to the transmission link - less than 150 nanoseconds - compared to our non-encrypted version. This stands in stark contrast to higher layer encryption technologies that often add significant overhead and multiply the latency of the data stream.

One of the most unique features of the ADVA 100G Metro with built-in encryption is that it also encrypts the header and checksum of the signal, not just the payload or select bytes in the header. Every bit that enters one of our client ports is encrypted. This is one of the most important aspects to comprehensive data security. There are no snippets or breadcrumbs that remain unencrypted, nothing that may be intercepted. What's more, with the ADVA 100G Metro with built-in encryption it is possible to separate network and encryption management. This ensures extremely granular control as to who has access to your business' encryption management. This is vital for any organizations that are leasing encrypted services and don't want their service provider to be privy to their encrypted data.

"The introduction of our 100G Metro proved to be a defining moment in the big data era. One that introduced 100Gbit/s data transport to a whole new market," commented Christoph Glingener, CTO, ADVA Optical Networking. "Cost, space and power consumption have long been defining factors for data center connectivity. Now a fourth one has joined the list of top criteria - security. Businesses need to know that their data is intact and safe. They need to know their data can withstand any attempts at network intrusion, any attempts to be stolen. That's what our 100G Metro with built-in encryption does. It provides businesses with the most robust security possible; it provides them with a genuine peace of mind. With this technology they can focus purely on their core business objectives and not the security of their data."