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Coping with the growing demand for bandwidth
DCS talks to Steve Alexander, Ciena’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.
Ciena provides optical and Carrier Ethernet platforms, management systems and a comprehensive service practice dedicated to ensuring the performance, availability and security of today’s real-time enterprise applications. The company’s offerings are currently deployed in support of disaster recovery and business continuity strategies, SAN/LAN extension, data centre networking, cloud computing, low-latency networking, WAN encryption, video transport and more. Ciena is a focused player with a global scale and industry- leading solutions that are proven in enterprise networks across several industries worldwide, such as financial services, healthcare, transportation, media, or retail.
According to Steve, the optical networking industry is at a very exciting point –in the early stages of a broad, multi-year cycle of network transition and optimisation. He explains: “In the same way that we first saw the rise of PDH and then SONET/SDH, today the networking world is moving towards global adoption of carrier-grade Ethernet. The fundamental driver for this is the constant growth in demand for bandwidth, which triggers the need for a scalable, cost-effective technology that will be able to support that demand.”
And what are some of the factors that February/March 2011
have led to this situation? Steve outlines: “Together with the rise in video and mobile broadband access, virtualisation and the cloud are some of the most significant drivers for the rise of Ethernet. It has been around for more than 30 years and clearly reigns in the Local Area, but today, with its carrier-grade features, it is set to conquer the Wide Area – because people can see how the same basic technology can, and will, scale effectively.
“In the case of Ethernet, the telecom and datacom worlds have converged around 10-Gigabits per second, and both have noticed the benefits – you can build telecom-quality networks with datacom parts and, simply put, exchange volume for performance. These two worlds are unlikely to come apart, and the next paradigm – already being realised, as our recent work in Europe with Verizon suggests – is around 100G.”
In terms of the likely roadmap for Enhanced Ethernet and network convergence more generally, it is not a simple journey, as Steve acknowledges. “The roadmap to full convergence is a multi-step process. There is, of course, already some level of fabric convergence happening on a very basic level, with converged network adapters (CNAs) providing both LAN and SAN transport from
server to top-of-rack (TOR) switch. The next natural step would be to extend this across the data centre, providing a single, converged, intra-data centre fabric, supporting both LAN and SAN traffic.”
Steve continues: “The relentless drive toward the cloud also extends fabric convergence further, to the inter-data centre space. Full inter-data centre convergence, however, will require a shift in attitude to the accepted norms of data centre construction, implementation and management – a change that is undoubtedly coming, but will take some time. Overall, I would estimate we are some three years away from commonplace end-to- end fabric convergence within and between meshed data centres, with more advanced and demanding organisations probably moving sooner in that direction in order to secure a competitive edge. These will also be some of Ciena’s leading customers.”
A development to be welcomes if end users are to fully realise the benefits of virtualisation and the cloud.
Network automation seems to be another topic with which data centre managers need to grapple as they seek to provide more business-focused and agile IT solutions for their organisations. As Steve explains: “Network automation – at all its layers
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