Welcome to DarkStar™
XKL’s DarkStar™ products are designed to allow data network engineers to deploy their own optical transmission systems in metro, regional and long distance networks
XKL’s DarkStar product line, led by the flagship DXM Optical Transport System, is designed to allow enterprises to easily and cost-effectively build private optical networks with massive bandwidth, giving an alternative to the traditional solution of using expensive carrier services. The benefits of this approach include higher reliability, reduced cost and power and more control over IT resources.
DarkStar products are designed to require no optical engineering expertise. XKL accomplishes this by integrating most of the components of a complete fiber optics transmission system into a simple 1RU package. This allows DarkStar products to be nearly “plug and play” systems.
XKL has chosen simple conservative optical guidelines that a network designer need not be an optics expert to understand. For control of DarkStar products, XKL has integrated a complete management package, which is accessed through a familiar router-like CLI (Command Line Interface). Operators of routers should have no difficulty operating DarkStar products.
Reliability and ease of use are the hallmarks of the DarkStar product line. These systems make use of industry-standard or commodity components rather than proprietary or custom components. This ensures wide availability of parts and allows XKL to produce high-quality, reliable and cost effective DarkStar products.
The foundation of XKL technology is focused on the high performance and high availability requirements of mission critical applications. The DarkStar products are engineered with hot-swappable cooling and power components and are designed to use relatively little power. This increases the range of operating temperatures for the various products and increases the life of critical components — especially lasers and power supplies.
XKL’s DWDM multiplexer optics are simple passive filters, not complex active devices that could fail. XKL goes further by not only filtering the multicolored light on the receiving side, but on the transmission side as well. This additional filtering protects a possibly defective channel in the system from disturbing the other channels. To manage the customer’s network, every non-passive DarkStar product comes with an integrated out-of-band management network or optical service channel. It’s not an option, as XKL firmly believes that it should be used to deliver a robust optical network. The management network used on the optical service channel is based on industry-standard TCP/IP protocols. They are familiar to the enterprise data network engineer and proved to be robust in the industry.
XKL is located in Kirkland, Washington and led by CEO and Cisco Systems co-founder, Len Bosack.