XKL LLC announced Feb. 25 that its new DarkStar DWDM appliance solutions are driving adoption of 10G and 100G cloud and data center interconnects. DarkStar DWDM appliances are resonating with customers and DWDM appliance sales were XKL’s strongest-growing product area in 4Q2014. The new products offer Green 1RU low-power optical transport for enterprise network expansion, service providers and cloud migration. XKL DarkStar DWDM appliances are optimized for enterprise manageability.
“Many of the recent cloud outages around the world were due to a lack of manageability,” commented Chad Lamb, director of engineering at XKL. “That is, network owners, when faced with upgrading firmware or updating software in their server, router, switch or transport nodes, were unable to achieve these improvements without bringing down parts of the network – destabilizing service for millions of users. What’s worse, it often means taking the network out of service entirely for ‘preventive maintenance’. The DarkStar DWDM appliance is different in that these upgrades and overall management can typically be done without a hard reboot, without specialized optical engineering and, most importantly, without affecting customer traffic.”
The DarkStar DWDM appliances provide up to 10x10G interfaces for both enterprise dark fiber and lit service operations and features "hitless" upgrades, 1RU, Green technology and installation in less than an hour.
“We have a duty to make our network solutions easily managed for everyone,” adds Lamb. “The optimization of our DarkStar systems for enterprises does just that. Our DarkStar DWDM appliances have enviable update and upgrade capability and are fully optimized to address the specific network management needs of expanding enterprise networks, cloud migrations, and data center interconnects. As an appliance, all the components of an optical transport system are fully integrated. There is no need for an optical engineer on staff to deploy these systems.”
