Ciena’s Waveserver 5 provides a path to 400ZR coherent pluggable technology, even in applications where the routers and devices are not 400G capable. In this video, we showcase two traffic modules supporting low-power 400ZR for single span interconnect and 400ZR as a client on-ramp to a long-haul network with WaveLogic 5 Extreme. Waveserver 5 raises the bar for compact modular platforms with extreme capacity scalability and the latest coherent pluggable technology.
The  last few years have  seen significant growth  in data center construction, a trend that’s set to continue. Global Content  Network (GCN) companies are driving much of this data center build out—operating  and evolving their networks to support cloud services on a massive scale.
As overall data center capacity scales to meet ever-growing demands  for processing and storage, data center architectures are becoming increasingly  distributed. Performance-critical applications such as business services, Artificial  Intelligence (AI) and big data require low latency, high bandwidth East-West  architectures to support the vast amount of machine-to-machine Input/Output  (I/O) being generated between servers. To maintain application performance, the  maximum fiber propagation between distributed data center locations must be  limited to about 100 km.
Consequently, GCNs need to connect these data centers in distributed  clusters, which need to have massive interconnect bandwidth and be in close  proximity. These two key requirements are driving the need for a full-bandwidth  optical interconnect solution that can deliver both high capacity and high  density.
These requirements are met with 400ZR, an Ethernet-based  networking interface defined by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF). Called  an Implementation Agreement, or IA, 400ZR specifies 400 Gbps optical  transmission over a single wavelength for Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing  (DWDM) deployments. The combination of 400 Gbps per wave and DWDM meets the  first key GCN requirement of massive interconnect bandwidth.
To  realize 400ZR, new design techniques are employed for the coherent Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and the electro-optical devices to achieve the low power and  small area needed to implement 400 Gbps coherent optical transmission in  QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors.
In the coming years, a new part of the network  will undergo transformation with 400ZR solutions meeting the specific space,  power, and operational requirements of single-span DCI network connections.
