Infinera Starts Shipping Its Infinera Cloud Xpress

Infinera, a provider of Intelligent Transport Networks, has started shipping the Infinera Cloud Xpress – a family of metro optical platforms designed for Internet content providers, data center operators and large enterprises delivering cloud hosting based services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Infinera has shipped the Cloud Xpress for production deployment as well as field trials to multiple customers.

The Cloud Xpress platform, announced by Infenera this fall, is optimized for the metro cloud, the transport network that provides data center connectivity within a metro area. A small, stackable platform, Cloud Xpress is designed to simplify the deployment of high-bandwidth connections while lowering the power and space required to scale metro cloud networks.

infinera-cloud-xpressAs cloud adoption increases, large network operators are reporting a magnification effect on incoming traffic, according to Infenera, such that a single request from an end user can generate a dramatic increase in the amount of East-West traffic between data centers. This magnification effect is dramatically accelerating the deployment of high-capacity transport solutions into the metro cloud. The Cloud Xpress is designed specifically to address this need.

Energy-efficient

“As Cloud applications and services have grown in importance, the need for high-speed data center interconnection has grown at a very high rate,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, practice lead, Cloud and virtual system infrastructures at ACG Research. “This has generated the need for new transport solutions with leaner form factors, higher densities and superior operating efficiencies. Cloud Xpress is well-positioned to participate in the emerging service provider data center interconnect transport market, which we expect to reach $4 billion by 2019.”

The Infinera Cloud Xpress features one terabit per second of input and output capacity in just two rack units with up to 500 gigabits per second (Gb/s) of line-side capacity and a mix of 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 40 GbE and 100 GbE client-side interfaces.

The Infinera Cloud Xpress is designed with a rack-and-stack form factor and a new software approach that enables it to plug into existing cloud provisioning systems using open software defined networking application programming interfaces. In addition, the Cloud Xpress would consume significantly less power than many comparably-sized metro cloud platforms on the market.