Airbus North America, looking to bolster its disaster-recovery capabilities, has installed a new WAN that lets it consolidate separate voice lines and provides virtually unlimited bandwidth for future services.

Two recent events in particular posed potential threats to the Ashburn, Va., hub of its network that prompted the company to focus on business continuity. First a tornado narrowly missed the Ashburn facility and then a mowing crew cut a fiber line that had been left exposed along Virginia's Route 28 during construction, says Charlie Fletcher, vice president of information services for Airbus.

Now if one of the Virginia sites goes down, the other four U.S. sites will still be able to connect with each other as well as the company's affiliates in Europe. "We're relatively comfortable that the same disaster would not take out both of those offices," Fletcher says.

Rather than issuing an RFP for the upgrade, the company opted to let its WAN provider, Global Internetworking, Inc. (GII), design, install and manage a new core network that relies on Ethernet over SONET to support redundant logistics centers as well as redundant e-mail servers. The core of the new network has been running for about two weeks and will undergo refinements over the next six months that will bring further redundancy to key resources.

Until this month the company's Ashburn site, where its logistics and e-mail center is located, served as the hub of a hub-and-spoke network serving 600 to 700 workers. It connected via point-to-point circuits to engineering facilities in Wichita, Kan., a flight-simulator site in Miami, headquarters in Herndon, Va., and a government-liaison/lobbying office in Washington, D.C. The hub was also the gateway to a DS-3 ATM link to France. All network communication among the offices was routed through Ashburn.

Losing Ashburn

"If we lost Ashburn, it would have immediate impact upon the capability of any of these offices to communicate with offices in Europe," Fletcher says.

While the SONET core doesn't save any money - "Oh, no. It was done strictly for business-continuity purposes," Fletcher says - it does allow for some T-1 voice trunks to be converged on the network. And because the ring is based on dark fiber, the company can add virtually unlimited bandwidth as needed.

The new hub is a SONET ring connecting the Herndon site with Ashburn 7 miles away. Also on the ring are two nodes that tie directly into points of presence for service providers AboveNet in Reston, Va., and Equinix in Ashburn, giving Airbus the option for dual Internet access, says Scott Mutchler, senior systems internal consultant for Airbus. At some point the company may tap both of them for Internet access as well, he says, but for now Equinix is the active ISP.

The AboveNet point of presence (POP) is being used as the access point to the SONET ring for a T-1 to the Washington, D.C., office. The rest of the branch-office access lines, and the one to Europe, connect to the ring at the Equinix POP.

Fletcher says he chose to outsource the WAN to GII because it had delivered good service for two years. "It's one of the few companies I've felt this comfortable with," Mutchler says. Plus, Airbus would have had to pay early termination fees if it chose another provider, he says.

During design of the network, Airbus and GII considered using dense wavelength division multiplexing gear from Cisco or White Rock, but it was too expensive and provided too much bandwidth to be cost effective. So Airbus decided on OC-48 SONET equipment from Turin Networks that can be upgraded to OC-192 if the need arises.

Turin's multiservice switches send traffic in one direction around the two-fiber ring, each fiber carrying 5M bit/sec of a logical 10M bit/sec Ethernet-over-SONET connection. If a fiber is cut the traffic switches direction on the ring within 50 millisec to restore service. If one fiber fails, the other fiber provides half the bandwidth, but the network stays up, Mutchler says.

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