Zeetta’s OpenFlow 1.4 control interface ported onto Polatis’ optical switch

Zeetta Networks, a leader in Open Networking solutions for heterogeneous networks, announced today that it has integrated Zeetta’s OpenFlow 1.4 control interface onto Polatis’ Series 7000 – 384×384 port Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) products. The partnership between Polatis and Zeetta continues the successful cooperation with the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol, spanning over five years.

The Polatis Series 7000n Optical Switch is the largest-capacity, highest-density, highest-performance and most reliable non-blocking all-optical matrix switch available in the industry today.  The 384×384 OCS only has the energy consumption of a lightbulb, but can route over 3.7Pb/s of optical traffic, with up to 9.6Tb/s capacity per fibre.

The addition of Zeetta’s OpenFlow 1.4 control interface to Polatis’ OCS brings, for the first time, standards-compliant Software-Defined Networking (SDN) programmability to optical circuit switching, thus enhancing the ability to integrate seamlessly with SDN control planes and support time-critical and very low-latency cloud services in hybrid packet-optical data centres.

Vassilis Seferidis, CEO of Zeetta Networks, said: “The new Polatis Series 7000 OCS reaffirms Polatis’ leadership in fibre layer switching solutions. Adding OpenFlow 1.4 support enables SDN programmability for better efficiency and capacity utilisation across the whole datacentre network.  Thanks to the modularity of Zeetta’s OpenFlow 1.4 Agent architecture we are able to embed it directly onto an OCS product so we can achieve the fastest possible response and highest conceivable transparency of the underlying forwarding functionality.”

Gerald Wesel, CEO at Polatis commented: “Zeetta’s OpenFlow expertise has extended the functionality of our new Series 7000 OCS for integration with transport SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions to create large, flexible and dynamic optical networks.”