Service Provider Networks / (none) / View from the Edge:

Managed optical services to bow at NFOEC

Akara mux lights up storage for enterprises.

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 7/06/01

At NFOEC next week, start-up Akara will unveil a switch designed to deliver managed wavelength services to enterprises.

Akara was founded in March 2000 by former Cambrian executives and is funded by Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. Nortel acquired Cambrian in 1998.

Storage is the killer app for wavelengths to the enterprise, says Akara CEO Ed Ogonek. Fifty percent of IT budgets are spent on storage, and 20% of storage expenditures are spent on networking, he says. Also storage traffic, as well as LAN traffic, is doubling annually, Ogonek says.

But even though $30 billion was spent last year on optical connectivity, according to Ogonek, only 5% to 10% of enterprises are buying it. What gives?

Enterprises need a tight complement between optical bandwidth and services. It's great to have a fat pipe but what about cost, performance, quality of service (QoS), security and manageability?

Akara hopes to cover all those bases with the Optical Utility Service Platform (OUSP), an "intelligent services" multiplexer that delivers public network-based Fibre Channel, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet services to the enterprise. The OUSP is essentially a SONET mux with STS-1 granularity that muxes up to six services onto a lambda at 100M bit/sec to 1G bit/sec increments, Ogonek says.

OUSP is designed to lower the cost of extending optics to the enterprise by 50% to 70% over dark fiber and dense wave division multiplexing, Ogonek says. That, in addition to manageability issues and a dearth of compelling new services, is what's keeping fiber from the building, he says.

Along with OUSP, Akara will unveil customers and partners for the platform at NFOEC. Storage Networks is a customer, and Corning is a partner. Corning and Akara will demonstrate 1G bit/sec "full rate" Fibre Channel services running over Corning's MetroCore fiber at up to 200km without regeneration.

Akara is also working with Brocade to certify interoperability between OUSP and Brocade's SilkWorm Fibre Channel switches.

Additionally, Akara will discuss at NFOEC how OUSP can offer guaranteed service-level agreements, QoS and security to enterprise optical converts by measuring, policing and enforcing latency and throughput thresholds. The OUSP rollout will include a management application for this.

"Today's proposition is a transport wavelength, just bandwidth, to the enterprise," Ogonek says. "This is managed services."

The software-programmable, three-rack-unit OUSP will include six service interfaces and two OC-48 trunk connections. It will compete with dense wave division multiplexing offerings from Cisco, Nortel and ONI Systems, IP storage devices, and multiservice platforms from Redback and Coriolis, Ogonek says.

Betas have been completed and the product will ship this month.