Infinera Cloud Xpress 2 sports Infinite Capacity Engine for data center interconnect

Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN) last week unveiled the second generation of its Cloud Xpress data center interconnect platform family. Appropriately dubbed Cloud Xpress 2, the platform is the first to leverage Infinera's previously announced Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE), which is designed to support greater than 1-Tbps superchannels (see "Infinera moves terabit optical networks closer to commercialization with Infinite Capacity Engine").

The 1RU platform leverages the ICE to support 1.2-Tbps superchannel transmission and 27.6 Tbps on a single fiber pair when the output of multiple platforms is combined. On the client side, each platform accepts twelve 100 Gigabit Etherent inputs. The Cloud Xpress 2 offers the multi-format benefits of Infinera's FlexCoherent Processor as well as in-flight wire-speed data encryption; encryption options include Layer 1 encryption and Layer 2 MACSec. The Cloud Xpress 2 also supports the company's Instant Bandwidth capabilities (see "Infinera offers Instant Bandwidth on DTN-X packet optical transport platform").

The system's built-in optical amplification supports transmission of the 1.2 Tbps per platform up to 130 kilometers on a single fiber pair without an external multiplexer or amplifier. For ease of use, the system also supports topology autodiscovery, zero-touch provisioning, and standard application programming interfaces for programmability and streaming telemetry. It also consumes 0.57 W per gigabit, according to Pravin Mahajan, director of product and corporate marketing at Infinera.

Overall, the new platform supports 4.8X the density and approximately 2X the efficiency of the original generation of Cloud Xpress platforms, Mahajan said.

"Cloud and content providers are the first to deploy any new technology that helps them better address the rapid growth of their networks," said Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst at Cignal AI, via an Infinera press release. "Infinera was first to market with a purpose-built DCI platform that did exactly that, and it essentially owns the market for this type of equipment today. The design of Infinera's new Cloud Xpress 2 raises the bar again with the density, capacity and operational simplicity that helps cloud and content providers meet the scaling challenge."

Infinera will sell the Cloud Xpress 2 alongside the previous versions of the Cloud Xpress, according to Mahajan. Infinera introduced the product in 2014 (see "Infinera tackles metro on two fronts").

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