Flexible OTN / fractional 100GbE

Wed May 29 14:39:41 UTC 2019

Tom,

Le 29/05/2019 à 16:20, Tom Hill a écrit :
> Very clear. If you do find this veritable moon-on-a-stick device,
> please do let me know.

I will. But I don't think it's for the lack of devices : every OCP
switch based on Broadcom's StrataDNX ASICs seems technicaly capable of
handling OTN, they even allow for a 250ns port-to-port fastpath for OTN
bridges if I got the datasheets right. It's the software that's missing.

> Asking PacketLight to fix their software might not be a bad start,

Well, I learned today that these boxes may be manufactured by Nokia, who
also sell them under their brand as "WaveLite Metro 200", packed with
another software. I'm waiting for the manuals to assess their feature-set.

> or perhaps asking their competition if they can do better (see
> Infinera, Coriant, Adva, Ciena, etc.)

I'm already running Coriants and… well… $8k per 100G port is simply
unacceptable. That's the price for a 6*100G+48*10G OCP switch with the
right ASIC. Also their software is a mess.

I mean, it's 2019, we can't build networks like 20 years ago. Automation
is mandatory. And we lack so many network engineers on the market,
running a linux-based network would let us recruit and train sysadmins
instead. Running their windows-only TNMS really hurts my teams' morale.

ECI seems to have a nice lineup with Apollo (9904x) and Neptune ranges,
I'm waiting for pricing.

But if I had to choose, running Cumulus Linux (or equivalent) with
OTN+MEF extensions (also SRv6 to build a terastream-like network) on
broadcom-based OCP switches would be far more efficient and versatile.

Best regards,

-- 
Jérôme Nicolle
+33 6 19 31 27 14