Testing of the new Voyager packet-optical switch, developed by Facebook and contributed to TIP, was done in Equinix data center.

November 1, 2016

2 Min Read

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Equinix Inc., the global interconnection and data center company, today announced that it is working with Facebook and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to deploy and test the Facebook-designed packet-optical switches, known as Voyager, inside two of its International Business Exchange data centers. As part of the TIP “Open Optical Packet Transport” project group, Equinix worked closely with Facebook to field-test this next-generation packet-optical networking technology.

Voyager is the first step in Facebook and Equinix’s journey of developing the next-generation network ecosystem for hardware and software. Today’s news builds on a previous announcement to provide Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Network Service Providers (NSPs) and enterprises with an optimal environment to push technology boundaries and develop next-generation interconnection solutions. Equinix will continue to work with Facebook and other vendors to include TIP-based hardware and software in their architectures as they deploy inside Equinix and develop the TIP ecosystem.

Announced in February 2016 at Mobile World Congress, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) was launched as a way for leading technology providers to develop new technologies and rethink approaches to deploying network architecture in order to support emerging 5G networking, IoT and virtual reality use cases. The scale, agility and cost requirements of these new use cases cannot be satisfied by traditional hardware-centric network architectures. By working as part of TIP, Equinix is helping to define the deployment, operational and support models for the new disaggregated and virtual networking infrastructure. Equinix will actively work with hardware and software networking vendors to create the ecosystem for this new, emerging networking model at Equinix.

Since joining TIP, Equinix’s CTO, Ihab Tarazi, has taken an active role in the group, co-chairing the Open Optical Packet Transport project group and also participating in the Backhaul track.

Initial testing of the Voyager open packet-optical switch took place in Equinix’s SV3 and SV8 IBX data centers in Silicon Valley. Voyager is a combination of compute, switch, router and DWDM transport technologies. Preliminary results showed zero packet loss and significant overall cost savings due to this disaggregated hardware and software networking model.

Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX)

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