The latest in the seemingly endless string of ADVA product announcements is essentially the "yin" to last week's direct detect announcement "yang." Today, ADVA is launching its latest terminal for data center interconnect, claiming a new industry density mark of 600 Gbit/s per wavelength or 3.6 Terabits per single rack. (See ADVA Hits 600G for DCI and ADVA Commercializes DCI Direct Detect.)

The direct detect technology essentially eliminates terminal devices, as one way to lower cost and reduce power consumption in the data center. The newest TeraFlex terminal raises the bar for terminal throughput and density for ADVA Optical Networking 's FSP 3000 CloudConnect platform to address the cost-power issues in a more traditional way for the same market.

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The companies that run massive data centers -- Internet content providers, cloud service providers and more -- "have different ideas about what is the best architecture to help them achieve their operations and cost goals," says Stephan Rettenberger, senior vice president of marketing for ADVA Optical Networking. Some "can totally eliminate the terminal, but others are asking, can I have a terminal that gives me the lowest possible footprint and huge data throughput so I can maximize the fiber to the optimum level, and this is where the importance of the terminal equipment comes into play."

ADVA is using the latest optical chip technology from Acacia Communications Inc. , the hot new startup which made its own ecosystem announcement last week, to accomplish the density in a terminal. "We believe this is going to be a new industry benchmark," Rettenberger says. "The strongest announcement I've seen is 400 Gbit/s on a single wavelength and this gives you up to 50% additional throughput." (See Growing Ecosystem for 200 GbE & 400 GbE Transport to be Demonstrated at OFC.)

ADVA also continues to stress the openness of its platform, offering the entire package or a disaggregated approach that decouples its Open Line System from the terminals to let each technology evolve separately, and make its APIs open.

All of this will, of course, be on display this week at the OFC event in Los Angeles. Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Craig Matsumoto will be on site, so check back here for further coverage.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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