Polatis and Quali deliver dynamic fiber-layer management
Bedford, MA, and Santa Clara, CA. Polatis and Quali announced they have developed and delivered an integrated fiber-layer management solution. Quali’s CloudShell cloud sandboxing platform integrated with Polatis’s family of fiber-layer switching products provides an easy-to-use and flexible solution for configuring fiber-layer connectivity on-demand. The joint solution enables infrastructure vendors, data center operators, and network service providers to quickly execute complex equipment, system, and service testing on high-speed (10/40/100+ Gb/s) optical backbones.
The integration allows Quali’s CloudShell software to control Polatis’s all-optical switching products, providing the ability to reconfigure Layer 1 resources dynamically from anywhere in the world. Further, it enables the orchestration needed to seamlessly manage higher layer network elements, and other connected equipment, from a single control point. Quali’s visual modelling tool dramatically simplifies the process of modelling and provisioning complex connectivity. The low loss and superior optical performance of the Polatis switches enable accurate and reliable testing, in a wide range of network applications, with virtually no latency and minimal system impairments.
CloudShell’s cloud sandboxing and DevOps automation platform manages the entire lab and data-center infrastructure: inventory, modeling, provisioning, lab-wide connectivity, resource planning, and reporting. Together with Polatis, the result is a highly efficient, multitenant system that enables fiber and equipment resources to be easily shared across multiple test topologies simultaneously without concern for conflict.
“By abstracting complex system environments, CloudShell enables Polatis customers to greatly simplify testing on high speed networks, and greatly increase productivity by enabling our switches to be used independently and simultaneously for multiple test beds,” said Gerald Wesel, president and CEO of Polatis. “Quali truly understands the need for the highest standards in testing, which is evident in the CloudShell platform when coupled with Polatis switches. Driven by our common customers, we are extremely pleased to partner with Quali to bring them the best possible solution for their testing needs.”
With CloudShell’s architecture based on abstracting connectivity and Polatis’s rich software interfaces, including NETCONF and OpenFlow, the integration enables testing of SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) applications. This includes stressing network topologies with intense packet generation, and simulating fiber cuts and degrading optical signals, among other tests.
“Our customers want to increase the productivity and efficiency of their labs and data centers while at the same time maintaining the highest standard of accuracy and reliability,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. “The ability to support existing and emerging environments, along with the flexibility to deploy Polatis’s wide range of fiber layer switches in their environments, makes this an extremely compelling solution.”
“WWT has been working with both Quali and Polatis for a number of years, and both provide the best solution in their respective market segments of lab automation and optical switching,” said Kathi Bomar, WWT technical solutions architect. “Not only will this partnership provide WWT with a tool for our internal labs and technical showcases, but we look forward to helping our networking and data center clients implement the combined solutions utilizing Cisco, Polatis, and Quali. We believe our customers will benefit from the automation of these solutions orchestrated by Quali’s CloudShell, as can be seen in WWT’s Advanced Technology Center.”
Polatis said it is the only all-optical switch vendor to release a NETCONF interface and associated YANG models required for integration with transport SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) management platforms. Polatis’s range of embedded SDN and network management interfaces include NETCONF, OpenFlow, REST, TL1, and SNMP.
Quali is a software provider of cloud sandboxes. Its CloudShell software automates the DevOps lifecycle, by providing dev, test, QA, and compliance teams with personal replicas of their production environments, enabling total control over the development, test, and release of products and applications.
Polatis delivers low-loss all-optical switching solutions for remote fiber-layer provisioning, protection, monitoring, reconfiguration, and test, with over 3 billion port-hours accumulated in service to date. DirectLight optical matrix switch technology scales from 4 x 4 to 192 x 192 ports, applying class-leading performance to provide dynamic optical networking for telecommunications, data-center, government, test, and video markets.
About the Author
Rick Nelson
Contributing Editor
Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.