Finisar and Xyratex Demo 12Gb SAS Embedded Optical Interconnect

Finisar Corporation and Xyratex Ltd announced a joint technology demonstration at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) 2012 exhibition from September 17 through September 19, 2012 at the RAI Conference Centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Finisar and Xyratex demonstrated, along with HUBER+SUHNER, vario-optics, and LSI Corporation, embedded optical connectivity within a 12GB/s enabled data storage enclosure showing how optical links carry 12G SAS traffic between internal controllers via polymer optical waveguides.

Embedded optical interconnect solutions are designed to meet the burgeoning demand in data capacity, bandwidth and accessibility in future cloud and enterprise data centres and are expected to overcome the projected performance bottleneck in data storage subsystems.

The demonstration leverages Finisar’s board-mounted optical assemblies (BOA), a new optics technology that is mounted on a board much like an IC and provides the lowest power and highest bandwidth density available in the industry. The BOA is protocol agnostic and supports up to 24 lanes of SAS, PCIe, IB, and Ethernet as well as proprietary protocols enabling an entirely new ecosystem of backplane applications, as well as high speed interconnects for supercomputers, servers, and switches.

"Finisar is pleased to collaborate with these partners to showcase our board-mounted optics technology for up to 28GB/s," said Rafik Ward, VP Marketing at Finisar. "With the ever-increasing demands for bandwidth in optical communications networks, we believe that our BOA technology provides the most innovative and practical solution available today."

Xyratex’s joint demonstration of a prototype OneStor enclosure took place within Finisar’s booth at the event. The prototype exhibit focused on how optical interconnects are implemented in SAS architectures and showcased Xyratex’s next generation 12G SAS controllers, Finisar’s optical engines, vario-optic’s polymer waveguides, HUBER+SUHNER’s optical backplane connectors, and LSI’s 12G expander technologies.

"Xyratex believes that preparing for the Cloud and Exascale eras requires new innovation in storage platforms," said Alex Worrall, director of Architecture at Xyratex. "Through working with Finisar and our other partners, we are able to demonstrate real-world applications and start to move these new technologies out of the lab and into actual solutions."