With network security at all levels becoming an increasingly hot topic, ADVA, an early backer of optical layer encryption, has expanded and extended its portfolio of security technologies to cover Ethernet.

Under the banner ConnectGuard, the vendor is offering ConnectGuard Optical, a set of security offerings for its FSP 3000 platform which includes its existing 256-bit AES optical layer encryption technology, and ConnectGuard Ethernet, offering Ethernet layer security via ADVA's FSP 150 platform, mainly for enterprise networks. (See ADVA Announces ConnectGuard Security Suite.)

The announcement comes almost a year after ADVA Optical Networking upgraded its optical layer encryption to support line speeds up to 100G, an announcement that turned out to be well timed to the rise in usage of 100G to interconnect data centers. (See ADVA Claims Metro 100G Security First , ADVA Touts Encryption for 100G Metro Optical Networks and Telindus Encrypts With ADVA .)

"On the data center side, I would say about half of our current projects, involve our security products," says Michael Ritter, vice president of technical marketing and analyst relations at ADVA. "We had been selling encryption on the optical side for three years. We got a lot of customer feedback asking for us to add support for Ethernet. Now we're adding a lot more management and security certification features and putting it all under one umbrella. This is about much more than just encrypting data."

Demand for security features is only expected to increase with growing NFV adoption in distributed network models, Ritter says. ADVA opened up about its NFV strategy, including security aspects, last month at the MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris. (See ADVA Gets Real About Virtualization.)

Want to know more about the optical sector? It's sure to be a hot topic at Light Reading's Big Telecom Event on June 9-10 in Chicago. Get yourself registered today or get left behind!

ADVA is not the only packet optical vendor playing up its security credentials. ECI Telecom Ltd. said this week that it has completed development on the NFV security offering it announced late last year. Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN) also has touted the encryption capabilities inherent in its 6500 platform. (See ECI Completes NFV Security Solution Development.)

— Dan O'Shea, Managing Editor, Light Reading