ADVA boosts resiliency and accuracy of NTP timing

ADVA has announced a new software release that extends its Oscilloquartz timing assurance technology to synchronization networks using Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Mission-critical services across many industries depend on reliable and accurate NTP timing. Now they can leverage an extensive NTP synchronization product portfolio with assurance controlled by ADVA’s Ensemble Sync Director management system.

The new NTP capabilities are extended from ADVA’s robust Oscilloquartz PTP product range and supported by Syncjack™ GNSS monitoring. They also leverage multiple form factors with redundant synchronization devices, multiple holdover options and versatile multi-technology gateways between GNSS, PTP and NTP, ensuring robust, scalable and highly resilient NTP timing architectures.

“Despite the availability of PTP, NTP remains the most widely used time synchronization protocol. It’s applied in many legacy networks as well as new IoT applications. What’s more, the sophistication of NTP timing is increasing, while the NTP protocol itself remains unchanged. Now we’re enabling our customer to deploy robust, reliable and secure NTP implementations built on our unique expertise and experience in delivering assured synchronization,” said Gil Biran, GM of Oscilloquartz, ADVA. “We’re setting a new benchmark for future NTP solutions using a combination of NTP architecture and highly accurate GNSS timing backed up with PTP timing domains. And, as all of our products now support our assured NTP technology, they offer customers virtually unlimited scale. With hardware-implemented NTP functionality, even the smallest SFP NTP server can support up to 500,000 transactions per second.”

To ensure NTP delivery is able to withstand a broad range of risk scenarios, ADVA’s resilient synchronization solution is engineered for both device and network redundancy. It features multiple backup options such as PTP- and GNSS-delivered time, as well as a variety of oscillator solutions that allow different levels of holdover. Comprehensive monitoring by ADVA’s unique Ensemble Sync Director management system helps guarantee the levels of performance required for time-critical network applications. Designed from the bottom up to support continuous assessment and assured timing precision, it automatically responds to any issues before applications can be disturbed by timing inaccuracies. The solutions also offer centralized GNSS monitoring and assurance, protecting timing networks from vulnerabilities, including jamming and spoofing attacks.

“Our homogeneous multi-technology synchronization portfolio now provides complete NTP and PTP time server functionality at the access, edge and core of IT and OT networks. This enables customers to build NTP-based networks today and switch to PTP with one click,” commented Nir Laufer, VP of product line management at Oscilloquartz, ADVA. “Our customers no longer need to hope for the best from their NTP servers. With real-time GNSS monitoring and comprehensive probing and analysis of timing quality, they can rest assured that their synchronization services have the highest levels of accuracy, integrity, availability and scale.”