Getting to know about the OTN Cluster

What is an OTN Cluster

An OTN cluster can be regarded as a combination of OTN devices. As shown in Figure 1, in an OTN cluster, multiple subracks are interconnected through cluster cross-connect boards to form an electrical-layer grooming resource pool, thereby achieving sharing of slot and board resources in subracks and facilitating inter-subrack service grooming.

An OTN cluster functions as an NE, which helps users manage and maintain devices, implements E2E one-stop configuration and monitoring of services, and effectively reduces O&M costs.

Figure 1 Schematic diagram and application of OTN clusters

Values

• Multi-subrack orchestration and grooming

  Unlike traditional OTN, in an OTN cluster, inter-subrack cross-connect slots are interconnected. OTN clusters implement multi-subrack service grooming and without adding service boards, thereby increasing network utilization, as shown in Figure 2.

  Figure 2 Comparison between service grooming modes for multiple subracks
  

• Resource sharing and planning simplification

  Figure 3 Service planning of traditional OTN
  
  Figure 4 Service planning of OTN cluster
  

  • The planning of traditional OTN services is difficult because slots and other factors must be considered for each electrical subrack, as shown in Figure 3.

  • In an OTN cluster, multiple OTN devices are interconnected to form an electrical-layer resource pool, where all slots can be shared. Focusing on the bandwidth of tributary and line boards, you can plan services without considering board slot restrictions and simply insert boards by service direction, as shown in Figure 4.

• On-demand capacity expansion

  As shown in Figure 5, if the capacity requirement is not high at the early stage, you can configure an OTN cluster with proper capacity first. In the future, you only need to add service subracks as required without network reconstruction, thereby achieving online capacity expansion.

  Figure 5 On-demand and online capacity expansion