Earlier this month, Astera Labs participated in the largest-ever multi-vendor interoperability demo hosted by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) where more than 30 member companies came together to showcase next-generation control management, electrical, and optical technologies.
At the show, Astera Labs demonstrated compliance of its Taurus Ethernet Smart Cable Modules™ (SCM) with the OIF’s Common Management Interface Specification – known as CMIS.
What is CMIS?
CMIS provides an industry standard mechanism to initialize and manage optical and copper modules, while still providing the capability to supply custom functionality and diagnostics. The CMIS specification is defined by three guiding principles:
- Common: it delivers a standardized rule book for all vendors to ensure that any module can seamlessly plug and play in any host.
- Flexible: it is agnostic, supporting a variety of modules with different speeds, form factors, link ratings, use cases and more.
- Extendable: it is designed to support future technology innovations.
Throughout the course of the expo, we had many conversations about the growing ecosystem supporting CMIS. Here are our key takeaways on CMIS from the show.
1- CMIS hits the communications interface sweet spot in data centers – supporting a wide range of modules today. The CMIS 5.0 specification was initially published in June 2021 and ownership of the spec was transferred to OIF in January 2022. It has already been broadly deployed in data centers with a wide variety of modules. During the show, three host vendors, two test equipment vendors, and eight module suppliers – including Astera Labs – came together to demonstrate interoperability and highlight the benefits of the CMIS spec’s common interface standard and fully agnostic form factor approach.
2- CMIS supports vendor specific metrics – so data center operators can gain critical insights. Taurus modules enable advanced fleet management capabilities using full CMIS features, security, and extensive diagnostics. Using the CMIS interface, Astera Labs can leverage the existing communications infrastructure to identify specific metrics, such as signal to noise ratio, so data center customers have the information to understand how well their system is performing.
3- Astera Labs is helping to lead the charge for CMIS optical and copper communications. OIF is evolving the CMIS interface to meet the requirements of next-generation technologies as data rates continue to increase. Astera Labs is excited to join this effort to add future enhancements and capabilities.
Get more info! Learn more about our Taurus Ethernet Smart Cable Modules that support the CMIS interface and enable Active Electrical Cables throughout the data center.