May 16, 2012
8:05 AM EDT
by
It's All About Open
Steve Alexander is Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Products and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, and counts more than 20 years in the telecoms industry. In today’s post, Steve discusses open standards and the recently unveiled Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) guidelines.
The use of open standards has been one of the fundamental “change agents” in the networking industry and it’s a bedrock part of Ciena’s technology DNA. When we started the company, we adopted a “superset of the existing standards approach” that created the industry’s first truly open DWDM system.
We repeated that approach as a co-founder of the Optical Inter-Networking Forum (OIF) and its control-plane based OIF interoperability events. More recently, we’ve used coherent optics and advanced digital signal processing to introduce open systems into the historically highly-proprietary submarine cable industry to enable 100G Ethernet services that cross oceans.
Open standards are most often associated with encouraging creativity by enabling a diverse and rapidly expanding user group, and once they become widespread, open standards generally support the most cost-effective scaling, too. We can see a time in the near future where the combination of increasing network intelligence combined with the use of open standards-based network programming interfaces (NPIs) enables physical network resources to be virtualized, just as we today routinely work with virtualized compute and storage resources.
This combination of connect (the networking function) with compute and store, to allow us to build more capable and efficient infrastructure machines, will be key if we are to enable infrastructure to grow by 10X and 100X while not costing 10X or 100X as much.
Last week, another key piece needed to enable a scalable infrastructure was unveiled . The new Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) from IBM is on its way to becoming industry best-practice for transforming data-centers, utilizing open standards to achieve cost-effective scaling while supporting a flatter, more converged network architecture.
This looks to be a nearly ideal approach to allow the connect, compute, and store resources to be virtualized and operationally united for simplicity and scale, and Ciena is pleased to support the ODIN initiative to help achieve this through open standards.
The Wide Area Network, including networks operated by carriers, will be a critical component of the combined “platform infrastructure” and Ciena looks forward to leading the development and inclusion of this component within the framework.
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