Big purple truck

…welcomes me on board.

The ability to add new capacity quickly is often praised by Infinera’s customers, and that’s one of the things the demo is designed to show. The company claims that setting up a new connection takes just 20 minutes with its kit, compared to 3—4 days using competitor’s equipment.

On board the truck, I met with Geoff Bennett, Infinera’s director of strategic marketing, who showed me a couple of tricks with the kit. The simplified network on the truck comprised three network nodes (cutely called London, Paris and Frankfurt), and an optical amplifier.

Yoo-hoo, it’s behind you…

There was a real-time view of all the equipment and all the capacity on the system. We set up a new connection, and pulled out a few fibres out just to check it was all for real. When a cable was unplugged, sure enough the system restored service by sending the traffic the other way around the network.

Control plane rules, okay!

Then we decided to go for broke and “delete” the network, to show how automated topology discovery could bring everything back up again. And so it did. (At one point the GUI decided to locate all three European cities somewhere just off the world map in what must be a parallel universe, but that didn’t matter, because the network was still topologically correct — phew!)

At this point I discovered that I might have overstayed my welcome…

How to deal with the press

Thanks to Jeff Ferry for the images.