Has Ciena Taken WaveLogic to its Logical Conclusion?

Ciena made a very interesting announcement this week, one that combines agile optics with software automation and intelligence.  WaveLogic AI is a programmable chip/module that adds considerable capacity and agility to Ciena’s inventory, and opens the possibility for extensive software automation at the optical level.  Given that Ciena has one of a very few totally capable orchestration platforms in Blue Planet, this could be very interesting.

WaveLogic AI brings capacity agility and reach in combination.  At metro distances, you can get anything from 100G to 400G in 50G increments per lambda (per wavelength of light carrier), and for backbone distances you can go up to 300G.  With lower 200G capacity you can push out to over 8,000 miles.  All of this comes with greater density and with low-level telemetry on the data stream to facilitate software decisions on route and capacity management.  The density and capacity combination would be pretty compelling by itself, and adding in the agility and detailed telemetry dimension could make it totally game-changing.

Two related things make this harder to assess in detail.  First, this is a chip announcement not a product announcement, so the specific way Ciena plans to use it aren’t completely clear.  Second, a lot of the benefits of WaveLogic AI depend on having the software intelligence to back it up.  That’s hard to judge without the product context, and doubly so when Ciena hasn’t really provided a super-strong link between Blue Planet software and the SDN/optical layer.

There are applications for 100-400G metro already, in areas like DCI and probably even in CDN.  It’s probable that 5G could consume it when it deploys, at least in the denser metro areas, and for sure NFV could use it as a link between cloud data centers.  In fact, my models say that almost all NFV DCI would end up at the high end of the range.  The question is whether these applications could really demand agility, and if so whether WaveLogic AI could meet the demands.

Carrier-internal stuff like NFV or CDN applications probably couldn’t benefit much from agility because if you’re going to allocate a lambda to a connection like that, you’d go for whatever it could carry.  There’d be no benefit to throttling down.  The application of the agility feature would come where either you’re offering a customer connection service or where you’re aggregating customer connection services with other stuff.  That’s a key point because this kind of aggregation could come only if you have services that are packet-multiplexed first then committed to an optical route.  Which means hybrid optical-electrical planning.

There are not going to be a whole lot of applications that can justify a dedicated lambda, and so the value of WaveLogic AI’s agility would come primarily in applications that offer aggregated routes, which means routes between electrical-layer (L2/L3) devices.  The question is how often transport-layer capacity agility would benefit these applications, and what would magnify the benefits.

If a lambda is used to transport several routes in parallel, then it’s very possible that the offered load of electrical-layer combination would vary depending on just how each route was being used.  However, the condition would occur only if you had what I’ll call “switched” optical traffic on the route.  If we had a series of routers all linked with lambdas, I can’t see why it wouldn’t make sense to just run them all at full capacity.  The electrical-layer device is doing all the multiplexing.  If we have several trans-switched routes, it’s a different story because the traffic on each of them is controlled by something different at the electrical layer.

This is why I’d have liked to see a product instantiation with the announcement.  If Ciena were to pair WaveLogic AI with something like OpenFlow forwarding at the electrical layer, they could create transit routes with SDN that could then link two L2/L3 devices across a bunch of optical switches.  Now, traffic conditions on any of the optical paths could benefit from agile capacity assignment.  It’s my view that without some tie with an electrical-layer route overlay that creates a virtual wire for L2/L3 devices to use, it will be hard to gain full benefit of all the WaveLogic AI features.

The other point, the Blue Planet linkage, relates directly to the virtual wire theme.  Yes, you could sell a “lambda buyer” elastic capacity that linked WaveLogic AI features directly to that customer’s service parameters.  However, few are going to buy a whole lambda.  For other agility applications, you have to assume that network management or traffic engineering is somehow altering the virtual wires and thus impacting the capacity requirement of the underlying lambdas.  This is the role of a high-level management system, which Blue Planet could certainly be.

When Ciena made their big Blue Planet announcement, one of my comments was that I didn’t see the tie-in I expected between Blue Planet and transport networking, which would include both optics and virtual-wires like OpenFlow could create.  I still don’t see that link being presented effectively, and so I’m not sure just how much Ciena has developed the notion of agile topology and capacity as a vertically integrated feature of the transport layer.  Without an explicit link to a high-level model, a link that’s then percolated downward to the optical layer, you’re left with agile capacity applications on a per-customer basis, which won’t sell the feature to many operators.

Link-level telemetry, which WaveLogic AI includes, seems clearly aimed at supporting higher-level route and capacity management decisions.  Without a product context to show the feature off, and without specific Blue Planet integration through the notion of virtual-wire routes mapped flexibly to lambdas, these features are just features when they need to be valuable features to differentiate Ciena.

Now that they’ve put this out, Ciena has to make WaveLogic AI valuable, which means that it has to validate the features they’ve chosen to include and emphasize.  If you strip out the agility and the link-level telemetry you’re left with a 400G high-density optical modem.  You could probably get that at a lower cost without the features.  That means Ciena has to quickly step up and defend its feature decisions, and to me that means announcing a compelling transport architecture that builds on them through virtual-wire services and integrated multi-layer capacity and topology management.  They need that, and a product context for it, quickly or they risk a competitor jumping into the voids they’ve left and taking control of the space.