Spirent and CALIENT partner to release the first complete orchestration and automation solution for next generation hybrid network test beds

San Jose, CA, September,  21, 2016: Spirent Communications plc’s (LSE:SPT) the global leader for lab and test automation solutions in mobile and cloud networking industries, today announced that it has incorporated CALIENT’s S-Series Optical Circuit Switching technology into the Spirent Velocity orchestration and automation software solution.

The combined solution enables network equipment manufacturers, service providers and cloud providers to consolidate and scale test lab operation, modernize test labs for employees or customers as a cloud-based service, or streamline continuous deployment when testing hybrid network functions.

Spirent’s Velocity is a hybrid networking test lab platform with a breadth of micro-services accessible via a RestAPI or an easy to use web application. Velocity offers a variety of automated test lab and test bed services including:

• User and inventory management

• Virtual and physical element connectivity and orchestration

• Scripted and repeatable test scenarios

• Monitoring and reporting of lab and test system functions

• Hyper-fast elastic search data store

Velocity provides a modern Lab-as-a-Service (LaaS) user experience enabling users to create, consume and share complex hybrid networking test environments and scenarios instantly

“Our customers have begun the process of modernizing their labs to meet the growing demands to test both physical and virtual elements together,” says Patrick Johnson, General Manager of Automation Platform Technologies at Spirent Communications, “The CALIENT partnership and technology integration advances the Velocity platform’s capability to easily automate optical connectivity and instantly spin up any physical, virtual or hybrid networking environment. Their virtually zero latency, technology agnostic optical circuit switching platform provides significant value to automated hybrid test labs.”

CALIENT’s S Series Optical Circuit Switches include the S320 and S160, both of which are used to create any-to-any, layer-1 network connections that can be reconfigured on demand. The S320 is a 320-port switch, with each port being transparent to protocol and bit rate and thus supporting data speeds of 100 Gbps and beyond with a total capacity of more than 32 Tbps. The S160 is a 160-port OCS switch with a capacity of more than 16 Tbps.

“Test lab architectures are becoming larger and more complex every day,” said Erik Leonard, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for CALIENT. “The proliferation of single mode fiber in hyper-scale data centers, test labs, service provider networks, and large enterprises that are moving to the cloud, is driving demand for 3D MEMS optical switching technology. Connection speeds of 40G, 100G, 200G, and 400G, along with recent software developments in SDN and NFV are driving investment in testing of hybrid networking products and protocols. Our joint solution delivers speed, agility and full control over all connections in the lab, regardless of the network equipment or protocols being used”. For more information, please visit www.spirent.com/Solutions/LabManagement.

About CALIENT Technologies

CALIENT Technologies is the global leader in pure photonic Optical Circuit Switching with systems that enable dynamic optical layer optimization in next generation data centers and software defined networks. CALIENT’s 3D MEMS switches allow data center operators to dramatically improve utilization rates of expensive compute resources that typically account for 75 percent to 90 percent of investment. Data center operators and metro service providers also deploy CALIENT switches at the edges of their networks to facilitate multi-layer network optimization for maximum efficiency and flexibility. In this application the optical circuit switches support network-wide implementation of SD-WAN regardless of the vendor or vintage of the optical transport system. The company designs and builds its systems using its own state-of-the-art MEMS fab facility located at its corporate headquarters in Santa Barbara, California.  For more information, visit CALIENT at http://www.calient.net.