CALIENT to Virtualize Data Center Pods With its New LightConnect Fabric Manager Software
One of the most important infrastructures in today’s digital environment are data centers. Whether you are updating your social media page or paying for your electricity bill, the information you request is stored in centers around the world. As virtually everyone continues to use these infrastructures, data center operators are under increasing pressure to ensure availability, reliability and security 100 percent of the time. CALIENT Technologies, Inc., a global provider of optical circuit switching technology, is making this possible with solutions center operators can use to introduce increased efficiencies.
The company announced the launch of the LightConnect Fabric Manager Software to virtualize data center pods. Pods are created by operators with custom configurations connected to the network core to distribute data and network traffic to their customers. By figuring out the best configuration for the equipment required in the data center, operators are able to clearly see what is needed and quickly build more pods if the infrastructure needs to be increased. With scaling proving to be a major issue for organizations of all sizes, centers can bring compute resources online with greater ease using pod architecture.
The CALIENT solution enables new virtual Pod (V-Pod)-based data centers to simplify the orchestration of Optical Circuit Switches (OCS)-based interconnect fabric to increase compute utilization and extending layer 2/3 pod boundaries. This will allow compute and storage resources to be shared between physical pods in data centers with improved intra-data center connectivity and increased server utilization.
What this means for data center operators is, they can run their pods with peak levels of utilization because compute resources can be allocated from other pods as needed. In heavy traffic situations, the center can be dimensioned to support the demand as a whole unit instead of managing each individual pod.
The LightConnect Fabric Manager has a topology and a cross-connect manager, which are used in tandem with two core functions in order to maintain a comprehensive view of the data center for the overall topology and optical connectivity. Additionally, it maintains the operational status of all optical circuit switches including alarms, events, and port utilization with a consolidated dashboard summary. Developed as a CentOS-based Linux application, it can run on off-the-shelf hardware or any virtual machine.
“Together, the new LightConnect Fabric and Fabric Manager enable a completely new paradigm in data center design and optimization that will support tremendous improvements in server and storage utilization. It is simply not possible to achieve these results with existing layer 2/3 switching solutions, because the round-trip latency of packet-switching is several microseconds every time the hop is made and that is far too great a penalty,” said Atiq Raza, Chairman and CEO of CALIENT.
CALIENT Technologies announced LightConnect Fabric Manager will be generally available in the second quarter of 2015.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
