Kanata’s Ranovus Developing Standards for Data Centre Transmission

Kanata-based Ranovus Inc., a supplier of ultra-fast connection technologies for data centre and communications networks, has collaborated with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. in a proposal to develop standards relating to wavelength division processing, enabling data to be streamed at a rate of terabits per second over a single fiber.

That is a mouthful and difficult to get one’s head around, but also essential to grasping the future of data centre transmission which will inevitably leave our current standards in the dust.

Mellanox vice-president Dr. Mehdi Asghari presented the specifications proposal on Monday at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit 2015 in San Jose, California.

“Previously, there was no standard for anything beyond 100Gb/s,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Now, the OCP will have an architecture standard that scales to a terabit and beyond on existing fiber, substantially reduces the cost of hyperscale data center networks.”
Ranovus and Mellanox are part of a group called the OpenOptics MSA, which also includes Ciena, Oracle, Vertilas and Ghiasi Quantum.

Multi-stream aggregation (MSA) is a new multi-layer architecture for broadband communications that resolves the various redundancies and pain points in current technology that hinder speed and reliability of communications networks.

The new MSA wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) specifications proposed by Mellanox and Ranovus will eventually enable data centers to use up to 32 or more channels per fiber strand.

“Our OpenOptics MSA collaboration with industry leaders has resulted in the definition of a cost effective and scalable solution for data center network connectivity,” said Saeid Aramideh, chief marketing and sales officer for Ranovus. “Our agreement on this specification is a major milestone for our industry which we believe will accelerate the adoption of silicon-photonics-based WDM solutions for the data center market.”

Citing the growing needs of data centre providers such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, among others, Ranovus CEO Hamid Arabzadeh claims that his company’s data storage technology uses one-quarter the power at one-tenth the cost of standard methods.

Just over two years old, Ranovus closed a $24 million Series B funding round in October, led by OMERS Ventures, BDC Capital, Deutsche Telekom, Azure Capital Partners and the venture capital arm of the federal government’s Export Development Corporation. Ranovus raised $11 million the previous autumn.

The company has expanded into a research centre in Nuremberg, Germany and a marketing applications engineering facility in San Jose.