Ciena introduced the latest iteration of its WaveLogic coherent optics technology that boasts speeds of 1.6 Tb/s and a significantly lower environmental impact compared to the product's previous generation, Ciena CTO Steve Alexander told SDxCentral.

Those technical achievements realized with WaveLogic 6 owe credit to Ciena's investments toward "full ownership of all the critical intellectual property and technology building blocks required to bring these solutions to market," along with the vendor's team of coherent optical networking experts, Alexander said.

The new WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) offering is optimized for performance and ideal for metropolitan, long haul, and submarine applications, and "networks with scarce fiber assets where spectral efficiency is a top requirement," the CTO said. The offer relies on digital signal processors (DSP) and high bandwidth electro-optics to provide twice as much capacity in the same data center footprint, which translates to "50% reduction in space and power per bit" compared to WaveLogic 5.

In addition to limiting energy use, WL6e drives further carbon emissions reductions due to its lower physical weight. That means less freight needs to be transported, less installation space is required, and there's less physical infrastructure that needs to be cooled.

Ciena also introduced WaveLogic 6 Nano (WL6n) as a footprint-optimized offering that "positions coherent into the fast-growing data center campus market for the first time," Alexander said. This offer provides organizations with "the loss limited link budget required for new optical switched data center fabric architectures, along with the requisite cost, footprint, and power needed for this application."

For service providers that are conscious about power and space limitations and want to extend 400Gb/s pluggable reach to long-haul applications, "WL6n delivers a high-performance product that enables 400G anywhere and extends 800G pluggable reach to 1,000 kilometer (km) reaches for the first time," he claimed.

WL6n is also geared toward cloud and content providers with 800Gb/s connectivity scaling needs because it offers "interoperable 800ZR based on the OIF Implementation Agreement," he said. And WL6n extends 800G reach for packet transport to distances of 500 km to maintain compliance with ITU-T/Open ROADM MSA.

Similarly to WL6e, the new nano version doubles capacity within the same pluggable footprint as the vendor's previous generation. WL6n also pushes the power, space, and cost efficiencies of pluggable optics to long haul applications, which provides "high-capacity connectivity in this part of the network at a fraction of the power and space," Alexander explained.

For both WL6e and WL6n, Ciena uses the "lowest power CMOS technology and high bandwidth photonic integration to offer lowest power solutions . . . along with more performance, that results in less equipment that needs to be deployed in the network," he added. "Ciena has a long history in technology innovation designed to help service providers do more with less – less power, less space, and less cost. Since its introduction in 2008, WaveLogic has already delivered 20-times more capacity over fiber for Ciena customers."