Nice article on ICE

Infinera goes multi-terabit with its latest photonic IC

In his new book, The Great Acceleration, Robert Colvile discusses how things we do are speeding up.

In 1845 it took U.S. President James Polk six months to send a message to California. Just 15 years later Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address could travel the same distance in under eight days, using the Pony Express. But the use of ponies for transcontinental communications was shortlived once the electrical telegraph took hold. [1]

The relentless progress in information transfer, enabled by chip advances and Moore’s law, is taken largely for granted. Less noticed is the progress being made in integrated photonic chips, most notably by Infinera.

The rest of the article is here: http://www.gazettabyte.com/home/2016/3/30/infinera-goes-mult…

If you don’t have time to read the entire article (although it is a good one) there were a couple of interesting reveals at the end.

  1. The first platform to benefit from the Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE) is likely to be the DTN-X
  2. The second platform is likely CloudXpress. CloudXpress is currently a 2 rack unit box that supports 250GB of line side capacity per RU (or 500GB total). With the ICE the capacity of that box will jump from 500GB to 2.4TB.
  3. The ICE has already been field tested. Turns out it was part of the Telstra trail detailed in January. Well what do you know about that?

Best,
–Kevin

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