Rather than focusing simply on speeds and feeds as is traditionally the case with optical vendors, exhibitors at last month’s NFOEC tended to focus more on services.
In past years, optical has been about lowering the cost per bit, says Marco Pagani, president of optical Ethernet at Nortel Networks. “Two years ago there was the recognition that the game is service innovation,” he says. “Element No. 1 of that is improving margins of service offers in metro areas to the enterprise. No. 2 is to leverage the infrastructure you have to add new highmargin capabilities. There’s a $300 billion installed base of SONET/SDH worldwide, so how do you totally leverage that?”
Nortel believes the answer is what it refers to as Optical Broadband Services, which include optical Ethernet, storage connectivity and managed wavelengths.
Storage is a particularly hot application right now, says Pagani, given that the Sept. 11 tragedy prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to mandate that financial firms need to store all transactions in digital form and be able to access that information under any conditions. Thanks to HIPPA, health care institutions face similar mandates. Even insurance companies are now charging companies differently based on whether or not they have disaster recovery plans in place relating to their data. In light of those and other requirements for remote data storage, Nortel at NFOEC announced plans to extend the reach of its metro WDM products from 200km to 350km in the fourth quarter of this year, and to 600km in the first quarter of next year. The company earlier extended its SONET products in a similar way, says Pagani.
Storage also was the centerpiece of Cisco System Inc.’s news at NFOEC. The company unveiled a new Fibre Channel-based storage area network blade to its ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform. Cogeco Cable, the secondlargest cable system operator in Ontario and Quebec, has announced its intentions to deploy the product, which is slated for general availability by the end of this year. Scott Messenger, director of product marketing and product management for the optical business unit of Cisco, also notes HIPPA and other disaster recovery requirements as driving the delivery of the new product. Initially the card will deliver 1200km reach over SONET, but a procedure called buffer spoofing will enable the system to span lengths of up to 2800km, Messenger says. This product is just one example of how service providers can leverage their existing SONET and WDM infrastructure by integrating new services with them rather than overlaying services on top of that transport, as has been the practice in the past, he says.
Gwen Avery, director of marketing communications at Meriton Networks, notes the shift in interest in how to deploy new services — not just delivering bandwidth but offering services like gigabit Ethernet and storage area networking services. Meriton at NFOEC unveiled its HSM (high-speed metro) architecture — which delivers a variety of services including SONET, gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and SAN on a shared WDM infrastructure — and three new products under the HSM umbrella (see story, page 42).
Upstart vendor Ceterus Networks at the show came out with a solution that allows carriers to use existing SONET infrastructure to support a variety of traffic types at any rate. The system bonds multiple copper- or fiber-based connections to aggregate bandwidth, which can then be parsed as needed among various applications.
Ken Wirth, vice president and general manager of optical networks with Lucent Technologies Inc., says another important development is the ability to add Ethernet with a card to offer new services on existing optical infrastructure. Jacob Larsen, director of business development for the optical networking group at Lucent, says most service providers have WDM in place, so they’re looking to use that infrastructure to grow traffic and revenue. At NFOEC, Lucent demonstrated a distance learning Ethernet in the enterprise application based on its DMX products over fiber and high-speed copper. This kind of application, says Larsen, is part of Lucent’s effort “to make transport equipment relevant to the enterprise.
