Meriton Networks Inc. at NFOEC in Orlando this week 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.
The architecture and new products are a direct result of Meriton’s “Fortune 5000 Initiative” which had the vendor survey high-profile enterprises like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs to see what top companies were looking to do with high-speed services, says Gwen Avery, Meriton’s director of marketing. Meriton went direct to these companies to ask about their needs after service providers told the vendor it wasn’t seeing significant demand for such services. The “Fortune 5000 Initiative” revealed that there’s a strong demand for high-speed services from this user group, but not at the price service providers were offering the services, says Avery. Meriton says the companies it surveyed also expressed their frustration with long provisioning times, and expensive moves, adds and changes.
Meriton product manager Coleman Hum says the company addresses all those concerns with its new HSM architecture, which he says enables service providers to deliver a variety of high-speed services with a “WDM out of the box” solution that delivers SONET-like network management and SLAs. Hum says delivering services over wavelengths rather than over SONET is 60 percent less expensive. And because HSM is a shared environment, he adds, the costs are lower per user as new users are added.
The company has already been selling its metro core CWDM/DWDM 7200 OADX box. With the new HSM architecture, Meriton also adds the 3300 OSU, a metro access mux that can aggregate traffic at the customer premises or the carrier’s point of presence. It can support CWDM and DWDM. And all cards have SFP (small form factor pluggable) plug-in optical interfaces, so service providers can plug in the services they need when they need them, says Coleman Hum, product manager, who says that SFPs are 50 percent lower cost than the average WDM interface. Four SFPs can fit into one Meriton 3300 OSU.
Also new from Meriton are the 1450 OFA and the 1100 DCM. The former is a collection of pre-, post- and inline amplifiers for DWDM applications. They feature extended variable gain range, noise figure and gain flatness, automatic gain control and fast transient response. The latter is a suite of dispersion compensation modules that enhance the performance of DWDM 2.5- and 10-gbps longer reach optical networks.
The 7200 is currently in three trials in North America. The 3300 was expected to be in trials beginning this month.
