Inphi Corporation (NYSE: IPHI), a leader in high-speed data movement interconnects, today announced that it has shipped more than 100,000 COLORZ® units, the industry’s first lowest power and most cost effective 100G Silicon Photonics PAM4 platform solution for 80km DWDM connectivity in a QSFP28 form factor.
The demand for bandwidth, driven by streaming video, social networking, cloud computing and mobile e-commerce, is motivating network operators to deploy cloud applications closer to the end users. Low latency and scalability requirements combined with geographical limitations favor the virtualization of connected regional data centers. This trend is resulting in a 55% CAGR in DWDM bandwidth for sub 80km links and early COLORZ adopters have made an architectural shift to IP over DWDM for Data Center Interconnects (DCIs).
By integrating Inphi’s PAM4 CMOS with its Silicon Photonics technology, Inphi took a unique approach to create an innovative platform solution that achieves a 60% in cost and a 75% in power savings. Accomplishing the COLORZ ramp to 100k within a span of only three years also validates the network inflection point in the adoption of switch pluggable DWDM optics.
Initially developed for the requirements of Microsoft, the COLORZ platform solution has now been deployed by more than 40 network operators, ranging from wireless carriers to military and educational networks. The operational simplicity combined with the economic value proposition continues to drive the adoption of COLORZ in the market place.
“We are excited to announce this milestone as its both an extraordinary achievement for the DCI market and for Inphi,” said Dr. Ford Tamer, Chief Executive Officer at Inphi. “This significant accomplishment underscores Inphi’s commitment to delivering technological innovations that dramatically increase the speed of data movement between data centers and help reduce total cost of ownership for cloud network operators.”
Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking, Microsoft Corp. said, “Inphi shares our vision for DCI connectivity and we applaud their achievement of a significant milestone. Inphi’s COLORZ platform has been an important contributor to Microsoft’s high bandwidth metro design, to help enable greater cloud performance in a highly scalable solution.”