Cloud Xpress 2 Storms the Market
By Stu Elby
Senior Vice President, Cloud Network Strategy and Technology
With our announcement today that the Cloud Xpress 2 (CX2) is generally available (see my short video), Infinera is looking back and celebrating over two years of Cloud Xpress market leadership, and looking forward to what we believe will be strong adoption of the latest member of the Cloud Xpress Family.
Figure 1. Cloud Xpress 2
Demand for the benefits of CX2 – 100 gigabits per second (100G) data center interconnect (DCI) that is scalable, simple, secure and efficient – is not confined to the largest internet content providers (ICPs), where CX2 is already deployed in live networks. A range of communication service providers, smaller content providers, internet exchange (IX) providers and even enterprises are just as eager to put CX2 to work in their DCI applications.
What’s driving this interest?
Clearly 100G is taking off in data centers and DCI applications, because bandwidth demand just never stops growing, and CX2 delivers massive 100G scalability. The entire 1.2 terabits per second (Tb/s) of capacity on the CX2 can be activated at once or in 100G fractions using Infinera’s unique Instant Bandwidth capability, which allows point-and-click activation of capacity without requiring new hardware truck rolls, installation or configuration. But scalability is not enough. Let me highlight three other attributes of CX2 that really get people excited.
First, simplicity. How do you build a DCI link of up to 130 kilometers (km) with up to 1.2 Tb/s of capacity? With CX2, you put one box at each end of the fiber and you’re done. No muxing, no external amps. No other product comes close to providing the same plug-and-play capacity-reach, and that makes CX2 extremely simple to deploy and manage.
Second, automation. If you’re a major ICP expanding around the globe, how do you simultaneously deploy multiple new metro DCI networks, each with tens of terabits per second (Tb/s) of capacity, with a small network engineering and operations staff? You use standard open application programming interfaces (APIs) that plug and play with your operations systems and features such as automatic topology discovery and streaming telemetry. If you really want to streamline things, you use zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) for automatic configuration and service turn-up. No need to send engineers to remote locations and no risk of costly troubleshooting when systems are misconfigured. CX2 supports all these automation capabilities and more, making it very operationally efficient.
Third, encryption. If you’re a cloud service provider, an enterprise providing financial or healthcare services, or frankly almost any type of company, how do you assure your customers that all their data is protected as it travels across your fiber network? If you deploy CX2, you get support for state-of-the-art built-in line-rate encryption with very low latency and conformance to the industry’s security best practices.
That’s why when we talk about CX2, we talk about the complete package of benefits that customers value: scalability, simplicity, efficiency and security. Put all these attributes together and you can see why so many different types of companies are looking to CX2 to meet their DCI challenges.
Check out CX2 and the rest of the Cloud Xpress Family on our website and come join the growing crowd of enthusiastic Cloud Xpress customers.
For more information, contact us.
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