Fields of Fiber

Digital Transformation – on one hand, it feels like yet another marketing buzz phrase. But on the other hand, it takes exactly that kind of broad concept to describe the forces driving everything from city-wide fiber optic projects, to hospitals pushing the cutting edges of networking and virtualization, to enterprise-level initiatives to create competitive advantage out of technological innovation.

The first two articles this week don’t mention digital transformation at all, but they exemplify the kind of “real” digital transformation we’re all looking for – which is what the third article is all about.

Towards the end of every week, I open up all of the articles we’ve shared on social media recently to look for interesting themes and through-lines to share with you in the weekly roundup. This week, the one that jumped out at me was the potential for virtual and augmented reality to finally start hitting the mainstream – and what that’s going to mean for our network infrastructures.

Last week, our news roundup looked to the far future, examining developments in the physics of light and technology of fiber optics, advances that will start to bear fruit in the next couple of decades.

This week, I’m bringing the focus back to the present, starting with a new study out from Viavi Solutions on the “State of the Network” based on responses from 740 enterprise network professionals. Keeping to the enterprise theme, check out what Arthur Cole has to say about the maturity of virtualization, and Jeremy Rossbach’s advice on how to keep SDN from “going bump in the night.” 

Over the past year of managing Fiber Mountain’s social media accounts, I have built up a routine of curating industry articles that are of interest to our customers and partners, ranging from data center stories, to virtualization stories, to new developments in the technology underlying our networks. These posts have been popular, but the nature of social media also means that they’re ephemeral and easy to miss.

In the interest of sharing the most interesting “News of the Week” with people who don’t necessarily follow social media, this week I’m starting a new routine of sharing the top 3-5 articles of the week all in one place on the blog.

As you may already know from reading Bill’s recent post, several members of the Fiber Mountain team recently made the cross-country journey from Cheshire, Connecticut, to Interop, taking place in Las Vegas. I was looking forward to this year’s show as much as any I can remember, due in part to our nomination for a Best of Interop Award, and because of the announcements we planned to make.

Interop was truly a landmark event for us, as we introduced several critical elements of our Glass Core network architecture. We announced the AP-4240 Optical Path Exchange (OPX), an optical cross-connect that provides dense fiber paths, enabling point-to-point or point-to-multipoint connectivity anywhere on the network. OPX creates Connectivity Virtualization, the capability to modify fiber connections via software without any human hands touching equipment in the data center. We also talked in-depth about our Alpine Orchestration System for the first time, the software that makes it possible to change those fiber connections remotely, and at the same time groom packets at the edge of the network to be carried over Programmable Light Paths (PLP)

When I returned to the Fiber Mountain™ offices in Connecticut after exhibiting at Interop Las Vegas 2015, I couldn’t help but think about how much the event has evolved through the years. I have been attending this seminal IT and networking  conference since its inception in 1986 when it was called the TCP/IP Vendor Workshop, focused on interoperability of various TCP/IP program stacks. 

When Fiber Mountain™ began its journey with a launch at Interop New York last fall, we certainly believed that we had a solution that would make a significant impact in the data center space. By engineering our Glass Core™ and Alpine Orchestration System to create connectivity virtualization and a simpler and centrally managed data plane, we were confident that we had created a more flexible, cost-effective and powerful network architecture than existed previously. 

You also likely understand that our Glass Core™ is Fiber Mountain’s™ solution to the problem I mentioned above. Glass Core replaces many of the core and aggregation switches that are currently occupying space, drawing immense power and causing latency inside data center networks with hundreds of intelligent fiber cables that can connect any two devices on the network, creating what we call connectivity virtualization.

What you may not know, however, is that Fiber Mountain’s solutions can do more than just help you reduce cost and increase capacity right now; they can also prepare you for a future that we believe will look quite different from today. What does that mean?

Well, I look at it two ways:

Last week, the members of the Fiber Mountain™ team who managed to make it out of the northeast before the nasty winter weather hit (apologies to our tradeshow and networking guru, Keith, who was not so fortunate) headed to Miami for Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC) business technology event, ITEXPO. As I mentioned on this blog shortly before we left, this conference promised to be markedly different from our trip to ITEXPO Las Vegas last August, before we had emerged from stealth mode. 

At last week’s conference, I was fortunate enough to engage with TMC CEO Rich Tehrani in a “fireside chat” that served as one of the event’s keynote addresses. Discussing the future of data center networks—and how Fiber Mountain believes our Glass Core™ and Connectivity Virtualization™ will transform the future of network architecture—in front of industry peers at the Miami Beach Convention Center was a thrill. Unlike those of you who have been following this blog regularly, many in the crowd were hearing for the first time Fiber Mountain’s vision of data center networks without fire-breathing, million-dollar core switches. It was certainly exciting to present our concepts to a new and diverse audience.

As I have said from the outset on this blog, our revolutionary Glass Core™ network design solves a number of problems for contemporary data centers, like the growing complexity of 3-tier architectures and exploding costs. The Fiber Mountain™ approach to network design—combining centralized packet switching SDN control with intelligent fiber cables to achieve what we call connectivity virtualization—allows data centers to break the cycle of regularly expanding their networks by deploying fire-breathing aggregation and core switches.

When you eliminate the need for such hardware, you also increase efficiency—as packets traversing the network have fewer packet processing hops to make—and lower CAPEX and OPEX by:

• Reducing the space needed to house network equipment
• Decreasing heating and cooling costs for hardware
• Slashing total power needed to run hardware
• Limiting latency inside the network