Cumulus, Facebook Push Open Data Center Interconnect

Cumulus Networks said it launched an industry-first transponder abstraction interface to give transponder vendors more interoperability and make data center interconnect technology more open. The company made the announcement at this week’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit in London. It builds on Cumulus’ earlier work to make its open networking Linux operating system available on Voyager, a Facebook-designed, packet-optical transponder platform. This year Cumulus and telecommunication company NTT led an effort through TIP to develop the transponder abstraction interface (TAI). TAI defines an API for providing a uniform way to control transponders from various vendors. This removes the software development work for network OS vendors to support new hardware, and it allows chip vendors to take their products to market more easily with existing network software that can support them out of the box. “TAI provides a vendor-agnostic way to manage transponders,” said Ami Badani, VP of marketing at Cumulus Networks. “In short, it allows for interoperability between vendors and unlocks any reliance on a sole vendor.” Cumulus wrote the initial reference device driver and open sourced it through the TIP GitHub repository. It also demonstrated TAI at this week’s TIP Summit along with other vendors involved in developing the technology. The demonstration used Edgecore’s Cassini open packet transponder and showed TAI enabling the integration of coherent optical interfaces based on merchant demand-side platforms from NTT Electronics. It also used ACO or DCO pluggable optical modules from Acacia, Fujitsu Optical Components, and Oclaro, running on Cassini, a hardware platform designed and contributed to TIP by Edgecore Networks.