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Enterprise customers seeking to maximize their investment in metropolitan-area optical networks can now aggregate up to 40 data connections over a single wavelength using the Cisco ONS 15530, Cisco’s new metro DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) solution, which was introduced today.
This “service aggregation” feature in the 15530 brings a new level of multiplexing efficiency to optical networking. By consolidating multiple information streams over the same wavelength, more of the available bandwidth is usable which lowers the total cost of owning and managing metro DWDM networks. As a result, the costs associated with DWDM-optimized applications such as synchronous data replication can be significantly reduced.
“Enterprises have a strong focus on maximizing return on IT investments now,” said Dave Dunphy, principal analyst of Optical Infrastructure at Current Analysis. “Metro DWDM and the kind of service aggregation features the Cisco ONS 15330 provide offer the tools to increase bandwidth efficiency to help meet those objectives.”
In the initial version, a single 15530 can multiplex up to 40 ESCON or Enterprise Systems Connection channels over one 10 gigabit-per-second wavelength. ESCON is a fiber optics-based storage protocol prevalent in large enterprise data center environments. Without the 15530’s service aggregation feature, users would need to dedicate a separate wavelength for each ESCON channel. A single ESCON channel, however, operates at 200 megabits per second, which would utilize less than two percent of the available bandwidth in a wavelength transmitting at 10 gigabits per second.
In future releases, the 15530 will be able to aggregate multiple higher-speed networking and storage services such as Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over individual wavelengths. The 15530 also comes ready to support additional storage and networking protocols including SONET/SDH, ATM, and FICON. Other advanced DWDM features include an Optical Supervisory Channel (OSC), used for management and performance monitoring, and four-channel Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (OADM) modules, allowing the 15530 to be configured in point-to-point, ring, or meshed network topologies.
The 15530 joins the ONS 15540 and ONS 15200 series in Cisco’s metro DWDM family, and further extends Cisco’s COMET (Complete Optical Multiservice Edge and Transport) portfolio. The 15530 is capable of transporting a mixture of voice, data networking, storage, and video traffic using up to 32 individual streams of light (or wavelengths) multiplexed across a single pair of fiber optic cables. With each wavelength able to transport from 2.5 to 10 gigabits of information per second, the 15530 solution offers a maximum capacity of 320 gigabits per second, making it ideal for high-bandwidth and high-capacity applications that power the data centers of large enterprises.
