Cisco aggregates SAN, LAN traffic over DWDM

HANOVER, GERMANY - Cisco wants businesses to aggregate storage network traffic and other services over the same wide-area fiber connections, and sees itself moving increasingly into the video post-processing market, a vast consumer of bandwidth.

The company announced two enhancements to its ONS 15530 Multiservice Aggregation Platform here at the CeBIT trade show Wednesday, with the aim of combining storage area network traffic with other services such as Gigabit Ethernet over a single optical fiber link using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). DWDM systems transmit multiple signals simultaneously down a single optical fiber by transmitting each one on a different wavelength, or color, of light.

"With a DWDM platform like this, we are able to put storage and other applications across a single fiber ring," said Geraint Anderson, vice president of optical and PTT marketing for Cisco in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a news conference here.

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HANOVER, GERMANY - Cisco wants businesses to aggregate storage network traffic and other services over the same wide-area fiber connections, and sees itself moving increasingly into the video post-processing market, a vast consumer of bandwidth.

The company announced two enhancements to its ONS 15530 Multiservice Aggregation Platform here at the CeBIT trade show Wednesday, with the aim of combining storage area network traffic with other services such as Gigabit Ethernet over a single optical fiber link using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). DWDM systems transmit multiple signals simultaneously down a single optical fiber by transmitting each one on a different wavelength, or color, of light.

"With a DWDM platform like this, we are able to put storage and other applications across a single fiber ring," said Geraint Anderson, vice president of optical and PTT marketing for Cisco in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a news conference here.

The Eight-port Fibre Channel/Gigabit Ethernet Aggregation Card can be used to combine up to eight Fibre Channel, FICON or Gigabit Ethernet signals on a single 10G bit/sec wavelength in a DWDM system, while the 2.5G bit/sec ITU Trunk Card can be used to combine multiple ESCON, Fibre Channel, FICON or Gigabit Ethernet services over a single ITU wavelength, the company said in a statement.

Where such services are carried between sites over a metropolitan-area fiber ring, the 2.5G bit/sec ITU Trunk Card can be used to add or drop a few services on the fiber at each site, the statement said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.