White Rock Networks announced today it has added a 10gbps VT1.5 groomer option to its VLX2020 Optical Transport System, effectively doubling its capacity.
The new option will be showcased at GLOBALCOMM next week, when the company also expects to announce its first service provider customer for the higher-capacity system.
“Five gigabit was good – a little better than some of our competitors, not quite as scalable as some standalone solutions, but with 10 gigabit we think we have hit the sweet spot in terms of the right balance of scalability and cost point,” said Paul Forzisi, vice president of marketing for White Rock Networks.
“With 10gig we can support up to four groomed OC48 trunks, and that’s a nice size to handle most of the applications where our transport [gear] is being deployed without having to go to expensive external DCS (digital cross-connect) solutions.”
A next-generation SONET device, the VLX2020 combines a SONET ADM with a DCS and an edge Ethernet aggregation platform in a single 2RU package. A DCS card for the VLX2020 is several thousand dollars while a standalone DCS is tens of thousands, said Forzisi. “It’s something on the order of one-tenth the cost [to add the capability]. Even if you deploy [VLX2020] as a DCS, in some cases it’s half to one-third the cost of others,” he said, explaining that using the VLX2020 as a DCS saves carriers the cost of interfaces to an external DCS and also simplifies circuit management.. “Using our equipment sometimes avoids or defers the need to invest for several years.”
Forzisi said the VLX2020 also is ideally placed to provide cost-effective VT1.5 grooming of DS1s.
“In many cases our transport device is already out there picking up circuits. So it’s often cost-effective for our customers just to deploy the VT groomer in those nodes at the edge because then they get more efficient use of the backhaul facilities to get from the remote office to the central office,” he said, explaining the VLX2020 can take those VT1.5s and pack them into DS3 backhaul circuits that are completely full.
White Rock Networks www.whiterock.com
