Network News: MRV, LSI, Cyan

MRV helps operators migrate to a 100G optical transport platform with OptiDriver, LSI Axxia network processors add big endian support for Wind River Linux, and Cyan partners with Intel, Red Hat and Conectem to demonstrate end-to-end vEPC and NFV at Mobile World Congress.

MRV Delivers OptiDriver to optimize 100G networks. MRV Communications (MRVC) announced the addition of a 100Gbps multi-protocol, multi-rate muxponder to its recently introduced OptiDriver optical transport platform. The purpose-built OptiDriver 100G muxponder enables operators to achieve extreme bandwidth efficiency as they migrate 10G and 40G infrastructure to a flexible, intelligent path to a 100G optical transport network. The OptiDriver muxponder offers remarkable flexibility with fully pluggable interfaces. These interfaces can host two 40G QSPF+, ten 10G SFP+ and a 100G CFP uplink that cost-effectively supports pluggable short range, DWDM metro and long range coherent 100G optics. It enables outstanding flexibility in service consolidation and ensures optimization for current and future high-speed technologies. “Most people know data center and content delivery network operators are experiencing a rapid growth in streaming video, cloud storage and virtualization data traffic, but many of these operators have limited fiber resources that they need to maximize. To accomplish this they need to introduce 100G solutions into their network. With the large amount of 10G and 40G ports in their network today, a flexible 100G muxponder makes for an ideal solution,” said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

LSI Axxia processors add support for Wind River Linux. LSI announced that its Axxia multicore family of network communication processors and accelerators now include big endian BE8 mode support for the latest version of Wind River Linux. The availability of big endian support provides software developers with greater flexibility and choice in their hardware options. LSI Axxia communication processors use ARM Cortex-A15 cores that are designed to deliver both increased performance and power efficiency. Wind River Linux 6 includes expanded hardware support for these latest ARM 32 and 64 bit processors. Built on the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure, Wind River Linux 6 also uses the latest Linux kernel to ensure customers have commercially supported access to the newest advancements from the open source community. “LSI Axxia networking solutions are designed to ensure the highest levels of performance and efficiency, as well as to offer flexibility and ease of system integration,” said Noy Kucuk, vice president of marketing, Networking Solutions Group at LSI. “Wind River Linux provides comprehensive open source tools and features that, when combined with the LSI Axxia development kit, offer reduced TCO while speeding time-to-market delivery for network OEMs.”

Cyan, Intel, Red Hat and Conectem demo vEPC and NFV.  As a carrier-sponsored, official ETSI proof of concept (POC) demonstration Cyan (CYNI) will present an end-to-end vEPC (virtual evolved packet core) network functions virtualization (NFV) use case at Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona. In the POC, Cyan's NFV orchestration platform Blue Planet will interoperate with Connectem’s virtualized packet core technology (VCM), which is capable of addressing elasticity, scale and service velocity even in the largest mobile broadband networks. Cyan will be collaborating with Intel to highlight the DPDK accelerated vSwitch in combination with the Intel Xeon processor-based servers that provide compute, delivering an ideal base for NFV performance. Cyan also is collaborating with Red Hat as the solution incorporates Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which combines the power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the OpenStack cloud platform to deliver a scalable and secure cloud datacenter. “Virtualized environments challenge every fundamental aspect of the wireless carriers’ infrastructure costs, access to capacity on-demand, and service velocity,” said Barry Hill, vice president, sales and marketing at Connectem. “With Cyan Blue Planet Orchestration, carriers can now deploy EPC infrastructure, which is normally a complex and difficult undertaking, in days instead of months. The joint solution that we will be demonstrating live at Mobile World Congress will illustrate how advanced technologies and platforms can be leveraged to re-define the economics and time-frame of service delivery for the mobile broadband market.”