Red Helix and Telescent announce strategic partnership
Category: News
Published: 29th April 2025
Protecting SLAs and revenue in large infrastructure environments with large-scale robotic optical switches
Networks, data centres, and test labs continue to grow in size and complexity. This can lead to provisioning and reconfiguration delays, as well as an increased likelihood of manual changes leading to errors, SLA breach, and lost revenue.
For many years we have helped our customers to address these challenges. For all-optical environments with high speed, high density, and high Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) switching needs, we provide Huber+Suhner Polatis’ direct light all-optical switches with matrix sizes from 8×8 all the way to 576×576 fibre ports.
For customers requiring a mix of electrical and optical interfaces, we provide Lepton Systems’ electrical to optical (and back) switches with up to 1,024 ports (using 1:4 breakout cables).
And for all-optical applications requiring low density, low switch speed and low MTBF, we provide and support XENOptics’ robotic switches in both simplex and duplex configuration with 144×144 and 288×288 port counts available.
But more recently, as infrastructure evolution continues, scaling the ability to remotely provision, configure, and troubleshoot can pose new challenges that must be addressed to protect SLAs and revenue.
With this in mind, we’ve teamed up with physical layer automation specialists; Telescent, to provide and support their very large-scale robotic all-optical switches and automated patch-panels for major-scale infrastructure owners.
With duplex port counts up to 1,008×1,008, and simplex ports up to 2,016×2,016, we can cater for your switching needs on a mass scale.
This partnership builds on our extensive capabilities for supporting your physical layer management and automation needs across your network, data centre, and test lab environments.
Optical switch applications
Networks and data centres need to be fast, flexible, and adaptive – as does how they’re controlled and reconfigured.
Using optical switches, Operators can remotely provision, reconfigure, and protect the layer 1 switching infrastructure with a simple to use drag and drop interface.
This centralised control of connections removes the need for remote site visits, lets you switch large elephant flows during peak times, and enables the mass aggregation of monitored WAN links for security obligations.
Switching in the optical domain also provides latency and energy savings by removing the need to convert inbound light signals to electrical then back again to light before egress. This lets you switch 100’s of fibres, each with 100 channels of 100G, using just power of a light bulb.
Network products are becoming increasingly complex, as are their testing requirements; meaning an ever-increasing portion of the product development cycle is spent on QA and regression testing.
Bringing automation to the test lab can shorten the QA test cycle, reduce the lab’s CAPEX and OPEX requirements, and increase test coverage and product quality.
And using optical switches enables the one-time clean connection of test tools in your test lab. This dramatically reduces test setup time – leaving more time for Engineers to focus on what matters most – carrying out the required work identified by the tests. It also reduces the risk of dirty fibre contamination from continual insertion and removal.
Our optical switches provide a robust and deterministic switching infrastructure, ensuring that there is no manipulation of the data that could cause an issue with your test results. All other types of switching system would require the manipulation of the traffic in some way – and are therefore unsuitable for lab use.
The combination of optical switches and test automation software enables a 24/7 remote lab for accelerating new releases and updates. See how we do this for CityFibre here, using a combination of switches from Huber+Suhner Polatis and Lepton Systems, and automation software from Quali.
Contact us
Whether you work in networks, data centres, or test labs, optical switches enable you to save time, cut errors, and increase productivity.
For more information or to discuss your needs, please contact your Red Helix Account Director, or complete the short form.
