Sipartech ups infrastructure resilience, quality through submarine net

As it looks to provide high-capacity, low-latency connectivity across Europe, meeting the growing demands of cloud providers, hyperscalers, datacentres and enterprises, leading European infrastructure operator Sipartech has deployed Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme submarine network service to provide wholesale 400GbE services over an 800Gbps wavelength.

Fundamentally, the strategic expansion on its submarine network is said to enhance Sipartech’s ability to bolster the resilience and quality of its pan-European infrastructure. The deployment includes both terrestrial and submarine routes, including the submarine cable system managed by Medloop France, connecting Barcelona to Marseille and Genoa.

Barcelona is regarded as a crucial interconnection site in the Mediterranean that links major datacentres and corporate hubs, with the Medloop cable providing a diverse path to the traditional outbound route from Spain to the rest of Europe. This is designed to help support the region’s digital growth, and ensure network service resiliency and protection from disruptions caused by weather events, mooring mishaps, construction accidents and even sabotage.

Managed by Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite, Sipartech’s network now uses Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and WaveLogic 5 Extreme to optimise bandwidth efficiency and flexibility. With the 6500’s architecture – described as “colourless, directionless and contentionless [CDC] photonic” – Ciena said Sipartech has now gained the ability to grow capacity and rebalance the network according to customer needs, as well as rapidly restore connectivity in the event of failures.

In addition, Ciena Services provided network design validation, installation and testing services, along with end-to-end project management, to ensure successful project execution and completion.

“We chose Ciena’s best-of-breed GeoMesh Extreme because it offers the capacity and reliability that allow us to keep pace with unabated bandwidth growth and avoid outages,” said Sipartech founder and CEO Julien Santina. “Our collaboration with Ciena makes it possible for us to deliver unparalleled network quality and reliability to our customers … [Its] ‘overland and undersea’ technology and wholehearted collaboration were instrumental to our ability to launch this new route.”

Virginie Hollebecque, Ciena vice-president and leader of EMEA, added: “With its Medloop cable, Sipartech is disrupting the status quo by addressing the critical need for diversified infrastructures in Europe. Datacentre operators and telecom companies have demanding and complex connectivity requirements, and Sipartech’s network, powered by GeoMesh Extreme, is up to the task of providing the dark fibre and other B2B lit services that bring essential digital activities in the region to life.”

As it was announcing the new work with Sipartech, Ciena also unveiled a 1.6 Tbps coherent pluggable offering to deal with capacity surges at hyperscale cloud providers due to expected growth in cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) network-related traffic.

To address datacentre fabric and campus applications, Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Nano (WL6n) will be offered as both 1.6 Tbps and 800G coherent pluggable services. The 3nm coherent ASIC used in WL6n will enable the 1.6 Tbps Coherent-Lite pluggable offering through support of dual 800G data paths in a single DSP chip.

“The rapid adoption of AI and machine learning applications will create a new wave in global bandwidth demand,” said Vlad Kozlov, chief analyst at research firm LightCounting. “Cloud and datacentre providers are responding by creating high-capacity connections inside and around datacentres. Ciena’s 1.6 Tb/s coherent pluggable offering, powered by advanced 3nm CMOS, brings new levels of scale and flexibility in how datacentres are built.”

Dino DiPerna, senior vice-president of global research and development at Ciena, added: “As capacity scales to higher rates, traditional datacentre technologies will start to hit physical limits, and coherent technology will begin to make its way into and around the datacentre. We saw the same phenomenon play out in wide area networks.”