Ciena, Juniper and Nokia Roll out New Optical Networking Hardware

The OFC 2016 conference is underway this week, bringing with it a number of vendor announcements on new hardware platforms to enable carrier optical networking.

Among the vendors announcing new products is Ciena with its new 6500-T series chassis. The 6500 T-Series promises more port density, enabling up to 24 Tb/s in a single chassis, up from 2.4 Tb/s.

“T-Series adds powerful new capabilities to our market-leading 6500 Packet-Optical Platform family and builds on its widespread installed base to help our customers build larger, more agile and robust networks that cater to rising web-scale demands today and well into the future,” Scott McFeely, SVP of the networking platforms division at Ciena, wrote in a statement.

Nokia, which recently completed its $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, also debuted new hardware. Among Nokia’s latest innovations is an expansion of the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) portfolio.

The Photonic Service Engine version 2 (PSE-2), from Nokia Bell Labs, doubles wavelength capacities and wavelengths per fiber. The PSE-3 is at the heart of the new 1830 PSS-24x optical transport network (OTN) switch, providing up to 48 terabits of capacity per rack. Additionally, the 1830 PSS expansion includes the new 1830 PSS 500G DWDM Muxponder, which can carry up to five 100G services per line card.

“With the launch of the PSE-2, our 500G Muxponder and the 1830 PSS-24x, we are again at the forefront of innovations, leading the way to 100G client services being the currency of modern optical networks,” Sam Bucci, head of optical networking at Nokia, said in a statement. “Thanks to the optical innovations of Nokia Bell Labs, we are able to keep operators ahead of today’s aggressive bandwidth demand curve.”

Juniper Networks is also making some waves at the OFC event, with new DWDM interface cards for the Juniper PTX and MX series routers. One of the new interface cards is a 1 TB coherent DWDM card for the the PTX5000, while the other is a 100 GbE DWDM card from the MX series routers.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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