Content Is King in the World of Optical Transport Evolution: Highlights of Infinera’s Participation in Content- and Cloud-related Sessions at OFC 2019
By Fady Masoud
Cloud Solutions Marketing
From open network architectures to transport layer analytics, innovations in optical communications continue to be driven by the industry’s leading content and cloud providers. This has been increasingly evident in recent years at the annual OFC technical conference, which provides an in-depth look at the technology advances that will redefine future optical transport networks as they evolve to meet increasingly complex challenges.
Through collaboration with Facebook and Oracle in coauthored papers and participation in industry panels exploring key trends in optical network evolution with Alibaba, Google, Facebook, Netflix and Oracle, we are excited to join many of the world’s leading internet content and cloud application providers for the OFC 2019 technical conference program next week, from March 3 to 7, in San Diego. Here are some highlights:
SUNDAY, MARCH 3
Artificial Intelligence for Data Center Operators and Optical Network Providers – Why and When?
Come and join us at this workshop, in which Antonio Napoli, Senior Lead Hardware Engineer at Infinera, discusses the role of artificial intelligence in data center interconnect and how it will reach its full potential along with other subject matter experts from Alibaba Group and Microsoft.
4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
MONDAY, MARCH 4
Deployable Undersea and Long-Haul Systems (M2E, Room 6D)
The lion’s share of traffic carried over subsea cables is originated by content providers and data centers spread across the globe. Come and join some of the industry’s brilliant minds as they explain how they set a new world record for trans-Atlantic spectral efficiency, achieving 6.21 bits per second per hertz to enable 26.2 terabits per second (Tb/s) of capacity using 16QAM. Infinera’s Pierre Mertz, Ales Kumpera, Lee Dardis, Jeffrey Rahn and James O’Connor will describe the science behind this technological breakthrough.
12:15 – 12:30 p.m.
Demonstration of Advanced Open WDM Operations and Analytics, Based on an Application-extensible, Declarative, Data Model Abstracted Instrumentation Platform (M3Z.1)
Data analytics will reshape the way we operate our networks and data centers. Join Infinera’s Abhinava Sadasivarao, Sharfuddin Syed, Biao Lu, Sachin Jain, Ashok Kunjidhapatham, Paulo Gomes, Radhakrishna Valiveti and Loukas Paraschis to get a glimpse into the future and understand how data analytics and machine learning are turning networks into intelligent, proactive and highly dynamic pools of resources for content delivery and data center interconnect.
2:00 – 4:30 p.m.
High Bandwidth Interconnect – Tb/s-Class Optical Engines Utilizing InP Coherent Receiver and Transceiver Photonic Integrated Circuits(M3A.4)
Content delivery and data center interconnect have triggered an ever-increasing and relentless need for higher capacity on optical transport networks. Come and join Infinera’s cream-of-the-crop research and development scientists as they explain how they manage to break physical barriers in building terabit-class optical engines using the latest breakthroughs in materials and nano technology.
Speakers: Infinera’s Gloria Hoefler, Ryan Going, S Wolf, C Berry, P Studenkov, M Lu, V Lal, P Evans, H Tsai, S Corzine, J Zhang, B Behnia, J Tang, T Vallaitis, J Osenbach, M Kuntz, A Hosseini, T Frost, L Chuang, M Montazeri, H Mousavi, S Porto, S Buggaveeti, X Xu, Jeffrey Rahn, T Butrie, A Karanicolas, M Ziari, David Welch, Fred A. Kish
3:00 – 3:30 p.m.
TUESDAY, MARCH 5
Data Center Summit, moderated by Loukas Paraschis, Senior Director for Cloud Transport System Engineering at Infinera
Keynote
From the world’s largest provider of internet streaming video, learn about “The Evolution of Content Delivery at Netflix” in a keynote presentation by David Temkin, Vice President of Networks, Netflix.
11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Panel on the Importance of “Open Transport” DCI Innovation in the Evolution of Metro and Long-haul Optical Networks
On this panel, Loukas Paraschis will moderate as thought leaders such as Chongjin Xie, Senior Director and Chief Communication Scientist at Alibaba; Matthew Mitchell, Director, Facebook Optical Network Engineering at Facebook; Tad Hofmeister, Network Architect at Google; and Glenn Wellbrock, Director of Optical Transport Planning at Verizon, explore the similarities and differences in open transport architectures for DCI, metro and long-haul transport.
12:15 – 1:45 p.m.
The Disaggregated Transport Network
The Telecom Infrastructure Project is poised to challenge and change the way we architect and deploy networks to achieve a greater level of efficiency and avoid vendor lock-in. Harald Bock, Vice President of Network and Technology Strategy from the Infinera CTO Office, will join this panel and provide insights on the latest developments and designs of next-generation disaggregated transport platforms fully aligned around the TIP’s vision and guidelines.
2:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Market Watch Panel III: High Capacity Long Distance Optical Transport: Challenges and Business Reality
Overcoming challenges is what we do. Come and join Infinera’s Vinay Rathore, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Infinera, as he moderates this session and discusses with other experts like Rene Schmogrow, Optical Network Architect at Google, innovative and practical solutions for overcoming the business and operational challenges of increasing capacity for long-haul networks.
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Innovation Opportunities in Transport Networks from Networks Analytics and Machine Learning
They say data analytics will eat the world! Seriously, though, data analytics and machine learning will change the way we communicate, starting with optical infrastructure. In this session Jag Brar, Lead Architect at Oracle Cloud, will summarize network analytics opportunities in transport networks, and Loukas Paraschis will take the stage to describe the innovation opportunities in optical transport systems that can be achieved by leveraging network analytics and machine learning.
3:45 – 5:00 p.m.
Control of Disaggregated Networks – Multi-layer Service Provisioning over Resilient Software-defined Partially Disaggregated Networks
Join this session to get a better grip on how to provision a service across multiple layers over a resilient software-defined network operated by disaggregated platforms. Sounds complicated? Well, such a task may be, but Infinera’s subject matter experts authored a paper and will describe in this session the secret sauce behind making such a task easy – like a walk in the park. Their findings will help you get better control over your disaggregated networks and reach a new level of efficiency and agility.
Authors: Arturo Mayoral, Victor López, Manuel López Bravo, Diego Garcia Montes, Oscar González de Dios, Alejandro Aguado Martin, Rafal Szwedowski, Konrad Mrówka, Fabio Marques, Zdravko Stevkovski, Quan Pham Van, Dominique Verchere, Lubo Tancevski, Juan Pedro Fernandez Palacios
6:15 – 6:30 p.m.
As you can see, it will be a heck of a show for us, so make sure you swing by the Infinera booth to see our latest technology innovations, especially our recently announced sixth-generation Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE6) optical engine with 800 gigabits per second per wave, and attend the various sessions we’re participating in.
See you there!