Infinera has announced that it had started shipping the Infinera Cloud Xpress. The Cloud Xpress is a family of metro optical platforms designed for network operators delivering Cloud-based services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Infinera has shipped the Cloud Xpress for production deployment as well as field trials to multiple customers. Cloud Xpress customers include Internet content providers, data centre operators and large enterprises.
Infinera announced the Cloud Xpress this fall as part of the Infinera Cloud Xpress family. The Cloud Xpress platform is optimized for the metro Cloud, the transport network that provides data centre connectivity within a metro area. A small, stackable platform, Cloud Xpress is designed to simplify the deployment of high-bandwidth connections while lowering the power and space required to scale metro Cloud networks.
As Cloud adoption increases, large network operators are reporting a magnification effect on incoming traffic, such that a single request from an end user can generate a dramatic increase in the amount of East-West traffic between data centres. This magnification effect is dramatically accelerating the deployment of high-capacity transport solutions into the metro Cloud. The Cloud Xpress is designed specifically to address this need.
“As Cloud applications and services have grown in importance, the need for high-speed data center interconnection has grown at a very high rate,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, practice lead, Cloud and virtual system infrastructures at ACG Research. “This has generated the need for new transport solutions with leaner form factors, higher densities and superior operating efficiencies. Cloud Xpress is well-positioned to participate in the emerging service provider data centre interconnect transport market, which we expect to reach $4 billion by 2019.”
“Meeting our commitment and shipping the Cloud Xpress in Q4 2014 is a key milestone for Infinera as we enter the metro Cloud market,” said Stuart Elby, senior vice president of Cloud network strategy and technology at Infinera. “The Infinera Cloud Xpress marks a better way to bring innovative Intelligent Transport Network solutions to the metro Cloud market by delivering a purpose built product with the right form factor, space and power profile.”
The Infinera Cloud Xpress features one terabit per second of input and output capacity in just two rack units with up to 500 gigabits per second (Gb/s) of line-side capacity and a mix of 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 40 GbE and 100 GbE client-side interfaces. The Cloud Xpress is designed with a rack-and-stack form factor and a new software approach that enables it to plug into existing Cloud provisioning systems using open software defined networking application programming interfaces. In addition, the Cloud Xpress consumes half as much power as the leading solutions from the vendors providing comparably-sized metro Cloud platforms.
For more information on Cloud Xpress, visit: www.infinera.com/go/cloud
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