Nortel Networks this week at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) show in Atlanta announced enhancement its Optical Networks portfolio aimed at helping service providers drive new revenue.
New storage over SONET interfaces for Nortel’s OPTera Metro portfolio enable small- and medium-sized enterprises with lower bandwidth requirements to meet the latency, availability and reliability requirements of mission-critical storage applications, and to extend storage area networks thousands of kilometers for business continuity and disaster recovery. These interfaces are expected to be available on the OPTera Metro 5000 series in April 2003 and on OPTera Metro 3500 in July 2003.
Nortel Networks also plans to offer an OPTera Metro 5100 SAN Gateway bundle that will provide a low-cost standalone Fibre Channel-to-SONET conversion capability to address the needs of customers with very low bandwidth SAN connectivity requirements. The OPTera Metro 5100 SAN Gateway bundle will be targeted to smaller enterprise customers who want to take advantage of the same technology used by large financial institutions throughout the world to implement business continuity of mission-critical financial transactions and will be available August 2003.
New optical Ethernet enhancements from Nortel promise to enable carriers to offer high-end applications such as voice over IP and video streaming to drive greater profitability.
Ethernet Private Line software and hardware enhancements across Nortel Networks Optical Ethernet portfolio include:
-- Gigabit Ethernet Private Line interface modules for OPTera Metro 5000, OPTera Metro 4000, and OPTera Metro 3000 Multiservice Platforms to support Ethernet private line service using Generic Framing Procedure (GFP). These modules also support GFP Fibre Channel, allowing both Ethernet private line and storage over SONET/SDH services to be offered using a single module and sharing the same infrastructure.
-- A 10/100 Ethernet private line module on OPTera Metro 3000 Multiservice Platform to provide interoperability with existing Ethernet private line service on OPTera Metro 4000, and give carriers the ability to offer global Ethernet services.
-- Ethernet software enhancements to the OPTera Metro 4000 series to reduce operational complexity and expense by simplifying provisioning, help reduce capital expense by increasing scalability, and increase flexibility by enhancing quality of service support.
Ethernet VPN enhancements to Nortel Networks Optical Ethernet portfolio include:
-- Software enhancements to OPTera Metro 3000 Ethernet capabilities that will position service providers to reduce capital expenses by supporting a four-fold increase in the number of customers that can be supported on each node; offer higher end-to-end resiliency and throughput by integrating multilink trunking; and provide guaranteed bandwidth to each customer.
-- Software enhancements to the OPTera Metro 1000 Series of Ethernet Service Modules that can give service providers a complete array of service options, including virtual point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and any-to-any service; the ability to monitor transmission delay; advanced traffic management capabilities; and unique QoS support.
Also new is OPTera Long Haul DT (DWDM Terminal), a next generation terminal designed to help service providers drive lower capital and operating expenses by extending the reach of DWDM networks.
In addition, OPTera Metro 1400 is now commercially available. This third member of the OPTera Metro 1000 family provides 12 10/100Base-T plus two gigabit Ethernet ports for connecting customers. Consistent with the OPTera Metro 1000 family, OPTera Metro 1400 may be used as a cost-effective way to extend the OPTera Metro 3000 backbone, or may be used independently to provide Ethernet VPN services.
The company also used OFC to highlight enhancements to its network management portfolio.
