Infinera (News - Alert) has had terrific success with its line of Cloud Xpress solutions. Building on that, the company today unveiled Cloud Xpress 2.

In 2014, Infinera introduced the Cloud Xpress, a blade-style solution that leverages the base technology of the company’s long-haul solution and delivers it in a compact form factor. Cloud Xpress provides 6 Tb/s in 24RU using 1 W/G. The products under the Cloud Xpress brand have enabled Infinera to capture 90 percent of the compact DCI market share due to their capacity, plug-and-play functionality, and reach, according to Pravin Mahajan, the company’s director of product and corporate marketing.

Now the company is greatly improving on those earlier products with the introduction of Cloud Xpress 2, which Mahajan says is noteworthy due to its optical leadership, and simplicity and automation. This new hardware/software solution delivers a 1.2 Tb/s super-channel on 1RU, provides 27.6 Tb/s of capacity on a single fiber pair, uses just 0.5 W/G of power, can be provisioned in less than 20 minutes, is easy to operate, and has a long reach (and without the need for external muxes).

It employs the Infinite (News - Alert) Capacity Engine, which Infinera introduced in March of 2016. It also features built-in security, operational simplicity, and data center automation support. In terms of security, it has Layer 1 encryption, and MACsec for Layer 2 encryption. And for management it supports both legacy standards like DHCP, RADIUS, SNMP, Syslog, and TACACS+ and new methods such as gRPC, NETCONF/YANG, and OpenConfig.

“Cloud and content providers are the first to deploy any new technology that helps them better address the rapid growth of their networks,” said Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead Analyst at Cignal AI. “Infinera was first to market with a purpose-built DCI platform that did exactly that, and it essentially owns the market for this type of equipment today. The design of Infinera’s new Cloud Xpress 2 raises the bar again with the density, capacity and operational simplicity that helps cloud and content providers meet the scaling challenge.”