In collaboration with Smartoptics and LightRiver, Marvell Technology’s booth at ECOC 2022 showcased live demonstrations of Open Hardware and related Open-OS, Pluggable Coherent Optics, Open Line System, and End-to-End Open Optical management with LightRiver’s netFLEX (Alien Aware Networking®).
The largest conference on optical communications in Europe, and one of the most prestigious and long-standing events in this field worldwide took place this past week in Basel, Switzerland. The European Conference on Optical Communication, ECOC, wrapped up on Wednesday, September 21 and welcomed scientists, researchers, technologists and more from companies and universities all over the world. Here, the world’s biggest and most influential companies gathered to present astonishing breakthroughs from materials and devices to systems and networks and offer insightful visions for the future.
Aside from serving as the key meeting place to share knowledge, exchange ideas, foster innovation and start collaborations on a global level, ECOC also features Europe’s largest exhibition in the field. Cue in LightRiver, and our esteemed partners, Marvell Technology and Smartoptics and our ‘End-to-End-All-Open’ joint development. Our companies joined together at Marvell’s booth, #219 at ECOC, to showcase industry-leading optical connectivity solutions and offer live demonstrations throughout the event. Demonstrating the IPoDWDM capabilities of COLORZ® II QSFP-DD 400G ZR+ optics for Metro DWDM ring applications, the live demos highlighted open, disaggregated multi-vendor interoperability reflecting Open-OS enabled Whitebox Switch, Coherent Pluggable Optics, 3-node ROADM ring, and Optical Domain Orchestration and Control with LightRiver’s netFLEX® (Alien Aware Networking®) among other things. The live demonstrations were a huge success – the booth received significant traffic from interested and enthused visitors and the feedback was incredible.
So, what makes Alien Aware Networking an ‘astonishing breakthrough” in the optical communications industry? A quick refresher:
In a DWDM system, an ‘alien wavelength’ is a colored optical signal that originates on networking equipment that is different or ‘alien’ from the optical line system. Alien waves can originate via transponders from a different manufacturer or from dissimilar technology such as a router with colored optics. These Alien waves are transparent to the optical line systems and are not under the management or control of the line system’s NMS.
Our Alien Aware networking solution embraces alien wavelengths allowing them to be readily monitored, analyzed, and managed end-to-end, no matter what suppliers or technologies are leveraged within a single network operator, or across multiple interconnected operator networks. This is possible via Multi-Vendor, Multi-Technology, Open Optical network automation enabled by netFLEX. Our services and software allow network operators to embrace the benefits of alien waves without the shortcomings that exist currently.
As the week comes to an end, we are grateful to Marvell Technology and Smartoptics for this outstanding partnership and for the chance to showcase our award-winning technology integration and network abstraction solution that is Alien Aware Networking.
