PDF of this tutorialA leading technology manufacturer, a financial services giant, and a regional power utility each has unique needs and networking environments, but each turned to the same solution: wavelength services.
Case Study I: Immediate Relief
A Fortune 500 technology manufacturer was seeking relief for the fiber backbone running between two of its facilities. ATM, Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet application traffic had exhausted the bandwidth capacity of 24 optical-fiber strands.
The company first considered merely leasing additional fibers. This strategy, though, would not only have been expensive but also effectively unfeasible. Securing the necessary regulatory permits to lease, bury, and connect additional fiber strands would have taken perhaps as long as 18 months—a delay the company was unwilling to endure.
Instead, the manufacturer turned to WDM. No additional fiber strands would have to be installed (only an active optical-networking system at each of the two facilities) to improve network performance for its 11,000 employees.
In choosing a specific system, ease of installation was a primary consideration. Plug-and-play installation capabilities ensured that the system the manufacturer selected would demand minimal labor from the company’s 16-person network support staff. Other systems, originally intended for carrier deployment, would have required complex software configuration during installation.
The benefit: The WDM system has multiplied available bandwidth by up to 16 times, providing ample support for 25 terabytes of high-speed, LAN application traffic between the enterprise’s two sites. In addition, the technology manufacturer’s product development and other mission-critical data is continuously mirrored. There has been no negative impact to network performance; all protocols run at their native speeds.
Case Study II: Disaster Recovery
No industry has been more eager than finance to put into action the new range of disaster recovery technologies. Here, millions of dollars in revenue per hour are jeopardized in the event of a data-center failure.
One leading global financial services company with more than 50,000 employees worldwide needed to replace a SONET–based infrastructure that linked its three data centers within a metropolitan area. The customer sought a more effective disaster recovery strategy that would not cut into network availability for mission-critical ESCON traffic.
As was the case with the technology manufacturer, installing additional dark fiber strands was quickly ruled out as too expensive and time consuming. The financial services firm identified DWDM as the ideal technology. Because of its ability to create virtual channels, DWDM enables enterprises to perform more extensive SRDF protocol disc mirroring. And, in the event of a data-center failure, the network switches over to mirrored data automatically and recovers taped data more rapidly and affordably than ever before.
The financial services company deployed DWDM platforms at each of its three data centers. Because it features an SNMP module, the system is managed and monitored simply, from the enterprise’s existing software-management platform.
The benefit: The financial services company has uncovered more bandwidth for ESCON and other multiprotocol application traffic. Most importantly, the primary goal of establishing an effective disaster recovery strategy has been met. The company’s on-line transaction revenues are now safe because data is backed up continuously. In the event of catastrophic failure at any of its three data centers, users would never know the difference; their requests on the network would automatically and seamlessly fail over to an in-service data center.
Case Study III: Evolving Needs
A U.S. power utility already faced tapped capacity along the 6- and 16-kilometer pairs of 36 optical fibers linking its utilities. Seeking not only expanded capacity for ATM, ESCON, Fast Ethernet, and SRDF traffic, the utility also was intent on positioning its infrastructure for easy future upgrades. If the utility was one day to implement advanced protocols such as Gigabit Ethernet or fibre channel, it did not want to be required to replace modules or configure data rate changes.
The utility went through a normal progression of decisions. Additional fibers would be too expensive and require too long of a delivery time. SONET was too costly with too many limitations. Once again, the clear choice was WDM, a solution delivering true protocol independence across existing fiber infrastructures.
A key determinant in the utility’s decision on a particular system was footprint. Like many enterprises, it could afford to devote only so much floor space for the devices it purchased. Size varied greatly among the vendors. The utility settled on a 19-inch, rack-mount device with a hot-swappable architecture.
The benefit: Nine fully independent applications are running on the same fiber pair. The performance boost the utility sought has been achieved. Furthermore, a high-speed module on the WDM solution that the utility selected enables upgrades from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet, ESCON to FICON, or SRDF to fibre channel with no change in hardware. The utility’s network can grow flexibly with its networking needs.
