Returning to Ciena’s Vectors event after a 4-year COVID hiatus was a pleasure. Vectors is a unique opportunity for customers to visit the company’s labs and see prototypes and pre-production hardware demonstrations – there’s nothing else like it. Customers like it because it is engineering rather than marketing-forward and puts them in the same room as those responsible for making things work. The event does absorb considerable executive and engineering time, and the 16-day duration was more abbreviated than in years past. We had the opportunity to take the same ride and attended sessions focused on WaveRouter, WaveLogic 6, as well as line system hardware and software.
WaveRouter and Coherent Routing
Following its much-awaited April launch, Ciena was eager to show off WaveRouter, the company’s first large edge router and a cornerstone of its Coherent Routing architecture. Ordinarily, seeing a router up close and in-person leaves much to be desired, but WaveRouter’s unique design made the experience worthwhile. It was instructive to see how its angled fabric ports facilitate fabric expansion without disturbing client connections and examine the chassis, which only distributes power and management to the interface boxes (as the line cards are known).
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