Ciena 8700 Packetwave Platform

Ciena was not only awarded 5 Diamonds for its 8700 Packetwave Platform, but it also was named this year's Diamond Technology Reviews Innovation Award Winner. This honor is given to products that demonstrate a game-changing technology, while five Diamonds are reserved for "superb" products that set new standards for performance and provide groundbreaking and new technical milestones, said Tom Gorman, president of opXL, and who spearheaded the Diamonds this year.

The judges noted that keeping up with today's bandwidth explosion in the core network is straining the infrastructure. Operators are quickly hitting space and power limits. The judges liked that the Ciena 8700 Packetwave Platform moves to combine today's separate routing and optical layers to provide better economies and performance. They see it as a move toward the long-term vision of an optical LSR.

"Simplification of our networks is critical, as is quicker circuit provisioning. Ciena shows real sensitivity to an operator's challenges," one Diamonds judge noted.

Ciena indeed saw metro network complexity as one of the major challenges facing operators and described something called the agility gap - the time between when an order is placed for connectivity and when it is turned up. This delay sometimes is so great that orders are actually cancelled, Ciena wrote in its Diamonds application.

The Ciena 8700 Packetwave Platform integrates 100 GigE and 10 GigE packet aggregation and switching with Ciena's 100G WaveLogic coherent optics and photonic technologies. A new MEF CE 2.0-compliant multi-terabit, programmable Ethernet over coherent DWDM packet switch combines data center features - 10 GigE density, power, and space efficiency, SDN/programmability - and metro network features - high capacity coherent optics, intelligent optical layer, high resilience and rich OAM.

The 8700 10-slot platform offers 200 10 GigE ports per shelf and delivers this capacity in a form factor comprising 10 RU. Ciena says the platform also consumes half the power of comparable offerings. "The importance of this 'green' advantage is underscored when one considers that upwards of 40% of the total cost of a typical data center over its lifespan is due to electricity costs alone," Ciena explained.

"The judges recognize the issues that are coming ahead," Gorman said. "They saw that Ciena's Packetwave Platform is a solution that will help to make those transitions easier. But it was also that they thought out space and powering issues as well, which helps to keep headend and hub costs down. The judges come from those environments and saw the real value in the whole solution."

Booth 1231

Click here to return to the main Diamond Technology Reviews page