BIG DATA

Open, Secure and Scalable; Leverages Low Power, High Throughput of Compass-EOS icPhotonics; Unleashes the Power of SDN

Compass-EOS has announced the SDN Forwarding Plane, a new networking element that is set to transform networking by offering a roadmap to replacing expensive and complex routers used in service provider networks. The announcement will be made at the TC3 Telecom Council Carrier Connections event. The company also announced that the next generation of icPhotonics technology which is the world’s densest chip I/O, powering its routers and SDN Forwarding Plane solution, will grow from its current total capacity of 1.34 Terabits/sec to higher than 10 Terabits/sec.

The SDN Forwarding Plane: The Future of Networking

Over the past two decades, networking vendors have evolved their products using essentially the same technical approach to building systems and networks that they’ve used since the Internet began. The industry found itself constrained by this approach and by the electrical chip interconnect bottleneck. The result was the creation of networking products that are physically large, power hungry and complex. As a consequence, when network operators added more services to their networks, it required more and more software features to be added to their complex and expensive routers, and as the software and its operation become more complex, these constrained routers cannot keep up with service provider expectations.

“When you look at the rise of SDN networks, you realize that for the first time in the history of telecommunications we can drive services at software cycle times – which means we can offer services at the speed of life,” said Matt Bross, Compass-EOS Chairman and CEO. “That difference has the potential of driving a fundamental change in telecom infrastructure. With the world’s first commercial technology combining high-capacity inter-chip optical interconnect and digital processing in the same silicon chip, Compass-EOS’ icPhotonics technology gives us the unique opportunity to completely transform the  information and communications technology industry as we know it, unleashing a new generation of devices and innovation that disrupts the current network equipment paradigm.

“This gives birth to a new network element – an SDN Forwarding Plane that takes its instructions from processes in the cloud and defines in detail what each flow in the plane is doing in a packet-by-packet basis,” Bross continued. “This type of technology capability simply doesn’t exist in legacy platforms. The SDN Forwarding Plane is more powerful yet less complex and power hungry. More importantly, it can also incrementally scale through the simple addition of more devices, just like servers are used to scale data centers today.”

“The concept of a new networking element that is scalable, secure, and open is what the industry needs to realize the vision of software-defined networking. Combining it with a breakthrough in throughput and radically lower power consumption – through the icPhotonics technology – is truly impressive,” said Michael Howard, Co-founder and Principal Analyst, Carrier Networks, at Infonetics Research.

The Compass-EOS SDN Forwarding Plane allows network operators to adopt SDN and NFV in a gradual and practical fashion. The new networking element attributes include:

• A scalable, high-capacity, low-latency, programmable secure packet forwarding  platform
• Support for SDN/NFV-based open-standard protocol
• The Compass-EOS AnyFLOW Architecture, a unique, hybrid SDN architecture that combines network topology resolution and packet forwarding on multiple levels
• Compass-EOS icPhotonics technology with  industry leading scalability and low-latency

Compass-EOS has formed partnerships with a variety of companies developing products and solutions for SDN and NFV, including those developing SDN controllers and applications. The company also joined the Open Daylight open-source SDN community, and is planning to contribute code and expertise for WAN-centric SDN applications.

Resources:

• Compass-EOS SDN Forwarding Plane White Paper available at http://compass-eos.com/technology/
• Compass-EOS SDN Videos featuring Mr. Bross  available at http://compass-eos.com

In a separate announcement, Compass-EOS announced that JT Lab, which provides global telecom services to top financial firms, has deployed Compass-EOS r10004 next-generation routers.