ODTN, Trellis and Stratum: A Seamless Packet-Optical Multi-Stage Datacenter Solution

Abstract

With the dramatic increase in data traffic envisioned for the next years, operator’s network will be requested to sustain a large amount of data traffic, while at the same time being more flexible easily upgradable and having a lower total cost ownership (TCO). The industry at large is shifting towards SDN architectures, with white-box devices and open source software as building blocks. Such trend allows for further optimization across network layers, packet and optical as an example, with shared infrastructure and control. In this paper, we demonstrate a full end-to-end multi-stage data-center solution, combining leaf-spine control from Trellis, dedicated optical link provisioning by ODTN, and switches and packet optical programmable devices managed by Stratum.Unifying optical and Ethernet capabilities, the Cassini packet-optical transponder acts as a spine in the intra data-center Trellis leaf spine topology, and as the transponder for the DCI inter data-center links.We will describe the implemented architecture, the overall topology, the changes required to achieve the end to end solution and the challenges faced. We then outline the benefits of the proposed solution in terms of resource consumption, end to end optimisation, reliability and resiliency based upon data collected in a physical setup at ONF. Finally, we conclude this paper with future work and proposed optimisations.