"Webscale" cloud providers and the data-center market are all the rage for optical technology vendors these days. Ciena today announced two new chipsets targeting growth in these markets.

Ciena today announced the WaveLogic 3 Extreme chipset and the WaveLogic 3 Nano chipset. WaveLogic 3 Extreme will boost bandwidth efficiencies on Ciena's 6500 and 5430 converged packet optical platforms, and WaveLogic 3 Nano will be implemented in Ciena’s 6500 and 8700 optical platforms, making them more energy efficient.

WaveLogic 3 Extreme will double capacity in metro networks and provide 85% greater capacity in submarine networks, according to the company. The WaveLogic 3 Extreme is available today, and it has already been deployed by Verizon, Southern Cross, Japan-US Cable, and Trans Pacific Express. WaveLogic 3 Nano enables high 100G densities in a much smaller footprint and uses lower electrical power consumption. WaveLogic 3 Nano will be available in June.

Ciena is also introducing new software, called Coherent Select, designed to make 100G technologies easier to implement for metro networking.

The moves mark a pattern among optical networking players to introduce technologies targeted at metro and long-haul networks to handle all the data traffic being generated by Internet content providers and cloud computing. Of particular interest is the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) market, which connects data centers, often with optical networks in regional and metro areas. The high bandwidth being consumed by Internet content and social networks, particulary video, has increased the amount of data being served back and forth between data centers.

Ciena, of course, isn't the only one going after these opportunities. In December, Infinera announced CloudXpress, a 100 Gbit/s packet optical technology targeting cloud providers. Cyan earlier this month announced its N-Series, a 100 Gbit/s optical networking product line built on an open architecture, using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) silicon.

Expect more along these lines. Social networking data centers are only going to get larger. Crehan Research has projected annual growth rates of more than 100% for sales of data-center switches at 40 Gbit/s and 100 Gbit/s speeds.