23 March 2016

Mellanox and InnoLight announce availability and interoperability of 100Gb/s PSM4 transceivers at 1310 and 1550nm wavelengths

At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exhibition (OFC 2016) in Anaheim, CA, USA (22-24 March), Mellanox Technologies Ltd of Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Yokneam, Israel (a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers, storage and hyper-converged infrastructure), Ixia of Calabasas, CA, USA (a provider of network test solutions) and InnoLight Technology Corp of Suzhou, China (which designs and makes optical transceivers for cloud computing) have announced the advent of interoperable parallel single-mode (PSM4) transceivers that allow cloud and Web 2.0 companies to mix and match transceivers in their data centers. Representing what is claimed to be a world's first for the industry, the Ethernet demonstration at OFC with Ixia's QSFP28 Xcellon-Multis Load module and Mellanox's Spectrum switch confirms 50Gb/s and 100Gb/s interoperability between Mellanox's 1550nm PSM4 transceivers and InnoLight's 1310nm PSM4 transceivers.

"Interoperability is an important consideration for Web 2.0, cloud, and telecom customers," says InnoLight's chief marketing officer Osa Mok. "We are delighted to participate with Mellanox and Ixia to showcase the expanded capability of our wavelength-agnostic transceivers," he adds. 

"We selected PSM4 transceivers because they are currently the best option for scaling networks from 10 and 40G Ethernet to 25, 50 and 100G Ethernet," comments Yuval Bachar, principal engineer, global infrastructure architecture & strategy at LinkedIn. "With PSM4, the transceivers are readily available at high volumes and we can have networks with a mix of 50G links and 100G links by splitting the PSM4 to two 50G ports," he adds. 

"Interoperability provides more options and better solutions for our customers," says Amir Prescher, senior VP & general manager of Mellanox's LinkX Interconnect business unit. "At OFC, we are demonstrating end-to-end networking using our extensive LinkX interconnect product family including 25, 50 and 100Gb/s copper cables, active optical cables and transceivers for both single-mode and multi-mode fiber applications," he adds. "The end-to-end demos include Mellanox's Spectrum switch with 32 100Gb/s ports, ConnectX-4 adapters with 25, 50 and 100Gb/s ports, and the newest LinkX products: 25Gb/s transceivers and active optical cables (AOCs), in the popular SFP28 form factor."

To ensure that all LinkX cables and transceivers work the first time and every time, Mellanox subjects its products to a full system test in a stressed environment. This means that network engineers do not have to waste time debugging a new installation with inadequately tested products. LinkX products deliver higher quality and signal integrity, allowing installation experts to bring up new clusters rapidly as the result of fewer interconnect problems.

To maximize overall data-center performance, all commercial versions of Mellanox's LinkX interconnect products endure full system testing to a bit error rate (BER) of 10e-15 (which provides 1000x fewer transmission errors than many competing products, it is claimed). Fewer transmission errors translate to fewer re-tries, higher system performance, and more revenue-generating traffic, says Mellanox.

Munich Instruments provided its 100G Ethernet C-BERT solution for the OFC demo. The C-BERT product family offers ready-to-use solutions for typical test applications enabling quick and easy installation.

Tags: Mellanox silicon photonics AOC QSFP

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