* Enterprises see optical networks in their future
Last time, we discussed the adoption of optical networking within enterprises, and in particular, the use of dark fiber by the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
When companies such as the New York Presbyterian Hospital look to deploy an optical network, they have two primary options: one is to acquire dark fiber from a growing number of providers, and the second is to acquire a SONET service from a service provider. In either option, it is common for the enterprise to deploy the equipment that allows it to manage its own network.
New York Presbyterian Hospital decided to lease dark fiber from NYSERNet, a consortium that provides dark fiber to educational and research organizations in the New York area. NYSERNet is one of the 100-plus entities that offer dark fiber services in the United States, in addition to traditional service providers, alternative services providers, municipalities and utilities.
Another organization that has deployed an optical network is The Children’s Hospital in Denver. Albert Oriol is the hospital’s IS program office director and data security officer. According to Oriol, the hospital has a dark fiber-based optical network between its two data centers and that network has allowed the hospital to split its storage clusters across its data centers. For additional disaster recovery functionality, the storage-area network at each data center continually writes to a tape library in the other data center using the optical network for transport.
Oriol is bullish about the performance of the hospital’s optical network. He states that the network uptime “is as good as it gets”. By that he means that circuit availability is typically 100%. He also notes that the quality of service is excellent and that it is relatively rare for any of the circuits to have errors, such as dropped frames or loss of synchronization.
In addition, Oriol did not find that complexity was an issue relative to the ongoing management of an optical network. He commented that his organization has no more trouble managing an optical network than it does managing a TCP/IP network.
The hospital is in the process of deploying a new campus and is committed to using an optical network to service this campus. Because the geographic scope of the network would be greater than the current network, the hospital is leaning towards using a SONET service from a local provider.
Optical networking is clearly not for every enterprise. However, the conventional wisdom that optical networking is inherently too expensive and too complex needs to be re-examined. In many cases, optical networking is highly cost effective and at least some enterprises are finding that it is no more complex than a traditional TCP/IP network.
