CrossFiber
Developing Flexible All-Optical Switching Systems

With broad market acceptance of cloud-based services, today’s data centers are growing in size and are providing software, platform, and infrastructure services for an ever increasing number of users. The amount of data produced is huge and executives in the IT industry are in agreement that IP traffic and data center workloads are growing exponentially. A significant test for data centers in the coming years will be managing these workloads while also lowering costs. “The ultimate goal is data center scale that augments computational performance and throughput while minimizing both capital and operations expenditures,” says Robert Rodio, Vice President, Business Development. Based in San Diego, CA, CrossFiber works with its customers and technology partners to bring innovative solutions which will enable novel architectures in data centers and provide greater scale in terms of speed of deployment, manageability, efficiency, and lowered operations costs.

CrossFiber specializes in the area of photonic switching, also known as all-optical switching. The networking component of data centers, sometimes referred to as the switching fabric, are traditionally built with layer 2 and layer 3 packet switching technologies. Introduction of photonic switching in the data center fabric improves the performance of large traffic flows while at the same time reducing the amount of packet switches required – thereby saving capital and operations expenses.

CrossFiber offers two advanced products; the LiteSwitch™ x96 (96x96) and LiteSwitch™ x144 (144x144) photonic switches, which come as complete, rack-mountable systems. The 96x96 is also offered as a subsystem to other OEMs for integration into their solutions. For systems integration in customers’ operational environments, CrossFiber works directly with end customers and/or with industry partners to build a turnkey SDN environment.

CrossFiber was founded in the wake of the dot com-era. During its incubation, CrossFiber developed and honed key technologies which enable reliable, low-cost photonic switching, and sets it apart from its competitors. From an end-customer perspective, this technology results in a high performance system that gives them peace in mind that the system will consistently operate well over a wide range of conditions.

CrossFiber has shown great tenacity for staying relevant in the market place by delivering technology that is the right fit for the industry. Now, the company’s market focus for the LiteSwitch family of photonic switches is hybrid packet-optical fabric architectures in data centers that enable high performance, reduced capital cost and lower energy use.

Lately, CrossFiber is focusing energy in business and market development. “There are three phases to be considered,” says Rodio. The first phase is the adoption of photonic switching in data centers. Moving past the adoption phase, the second is about the unique value statement of the photonic switches that CrossFiber delivers. “It is where the most traditional sales, marketing, and business processes matter,” states Rodio. “The last phase is about achieving and maintaining critical mass of sales volume, which is important in having a profitable and sustainable business” he adds.

Our photonic switching technology can be applied in data centers to create a hybrid optical-packet fabric architecture which reduces capital costs and dramatically reduces power usage

Being focused on the world’s top data center and content owners and operators, CrossFiber has a number of unique value propositions for the market it serves. “From the perspective of the end-user-customer, we emphasize improving the customer experience with cloud-based applications,” says Rodio. “From a data center operator’s perspective, our attention lies in customer retention, capital expense reduction, operations expense reduction, and operational efficiency.”

Moving forward, CrossFiber plans on building the industry’s best photonic switching solution from the viewpoint of performance and price, and continue to drive the adoption of hybrid packet-optical fabric architectures. “Our areas of focus continue to grow towards the capacity of the system as well SDN integration,” concludes Rodio.