GERMANTOWN, MD. – The Energy Sciences Network is adding 10G Ethernet metropolitan-area networks in key U.S. cities in a move that could increase commercial development of this emerging technology.
ESnet is one of the fastest IP networks in the world and ranks with the university community’s Internet2 and the U.S. Defense Department’s Research and Engineering Network as a leader of network technology.
Run by the U.S. Department of Energy, ESnet supports thousands of government, industry and university scientists who conduct experiments in areas such as high-energy physics, human genomics and climate modeling. Scientists use ESnet to transmit massive data files, access remote computing and data resources, and collaborate in real time.
“ESnet is the most advanced civilian network that we support,” says Jim Payne, senior vice president and general manager of Qwest Government Services Division, which provides ESnet’s nationwide backbone, as well as its first MAN. “We’re always testing the next-generation technology with them.”
ESnet is a nationwide IP backbone linking the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Germantown with more than 40 sites, including Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
Qwest has provided ESnet backbone services since 1999, when it won an eight-year contract worth an estimated $87.5 million. ESnet’s ring-shaped backbone network operates at 10G bit/sec in northern states and 2.5G bit/sec in southern states.
Starting in the San Francisco area, ESnet is adding a fully managed MAN with dual 10G bit/sec Ethernet rings. By 2008, the San Francisco MAN is expected to support more than 100G bit/sec as lambdas are added.
Qwest is building the San Francisco MAN under a five-year, $4.4 million contract awarded in March. This MAN, which will link six sites in the region, is scheduled to be operational by September.
“The system that we’re putting in place is a fully wavelength-provisionable network ring that we can add capacity to,” says Wes Kaplow, CTO for Qwest Government Services Division. “They’re starting with a ring structure with 20G bit/sec, but they have options to go up to 40 or 80G bit/sec. We expect that like the rest of the network this MAN will grow.”
The Energy Department plans to build similar MANs in Chicago and New York later this year. Department of Energy labs in Virginia and New Mexico are hooking into optical MANs being built by nearby universities.
The high-speed MANs will replace a hub-and-spoke-style design used to provide access to the backbone network. ESnet used conventional circuits ranging from 622M to 2.5G bit/sec for the local links to the backbone. Now ESnet is replacing these circuits with lambdas that can be provisioned on dark fiber MANs.
The Department of Energy’s goal is to provide greater bandwidth from its regional sites to the core of its network, as well as to improve redundancy by offering multiple paths from the sites to the ESnet backbone.
“The science community has said very clearly that they have to have networks that don’t have single points of failure if they’re going to have real science experiments deployed in the network,” says William Johnston, ESnet program manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As far as bandwidth is concerned, Department of Energy scientists say that within five years “uniformly the requirement is for 100G bit/sec.”
ESnet officials say the MAN architecture will improve the end-to-end performance that users experience when sending massive files.
“Our users demand the ability to transmit huge volumes of data rapidly and in big chunks,” says Daniel Hitchcock, a senior technical adviser at the Department of Energy. “It’s not like it’s one Web page at a time. They may want to transmit a 5-terabyte file.”
Qwest officials say the San Francisco area MAN being built for ESnet could be the highest-capacity MAN ever built for one customer.
“We have rings of this capacity where we are the incumbent local carrier, but this is the biggest MAN we’ve ever built for an individual customer,” Kaplow says.
ESnet’s early adoption of 10G Ethernet MAN services is important because of its track record in debugging emerging technologies for the commercial market. For example, ESnet was one of the first customers of ATM in the early 1990s.
“Sprint believes that we actually accelerated the acceptance of ATM by a decade by being willing to put it out there and help them debug this technology and make this stuff actually function,” Hitchcock says. “Now we’re starting to debug how you do optical networks and how you provision optical networks flexibly so you can set up lambdas from point to point.”
With its MAN rollout, ESnet will be among the first customers to integrate regional and long-distance optical links operating at 10G bit/sec, which is the highest speed possible today. Once these links are built, ESnet will explore how best to dynamically provision optical wavelengths to accommodate the transmission of extremely large data files.
“We’re exploring some things for the future where you’d be able to set up circuits on demand or even a whole wavelength on demand for extra large files,” Hitchcock says. “You can do it now if you want to set up something for a week or a month. But we’re trying to figure out how you can do it in minutes.”
The ESnet project is expected to benefit Qwest and Ciena, which are providing optical Ethernet switches for the San Francisco area MAN. Participants in the project will get operational experience integrating 10G Ethernet MAN services with a 10G backbone WAN.
“The ability to run 10G Ethernet services – all of that’s now going to be in place. We’ll be productizing that capability,” Kaplow says. “The experience of building private networks with a wavelength infrastructure, all the block-and-tackle stuff, we’ll be able to take that away and leverage it for other customers.”
Ciena sees a growing market for the metropolitan wavelength division multiplexing platforms that will be used on ESnet’s San Francisco MAN.
“The ESnet project is an important proof point of the adoption of 10G Ethernet technology,” says Jeff Verrant, a senior engineer with Ciena. “The Department of Energy consistently sets the stage for industry, including the enterprise sector, to follow its lead in support of emerging applications like networked high-performance computing for modeling and simulation, grid computing and data replication.”
Today, the market for 10G Ethernet MAN services is “minuscule compared to the rest of the Ethernet market,” says Brian Van Steen, senior analyst with research firm RHK. “We’re still talking about very few circuits today, but many service providers are expecting demand for 10G Ethernet MAN services to grow.”
Van Steen expects government agencies, financial services firms and popular Web sites such as Yahoo or Google to be among the first customers of 10G Ethernet MAN services. “These customers have all that data, and they have storage requirements and disaster recovery requirements,” he says. “For Qwest, building a 10G Ethernet ring for the Energy Department definitely will give them a lot of experience.”
Industry observers expect the market for 10G Ethernet MAN services to start to take off between now and 2010.
“This architecture is going to be what any large organization that requires high bandwidth and reliability is going to use,” Johnston says. “The model of using lit dark fiber or managed lambdas from a service provider is the clear wave of the future for people who have large-scale data needs.”
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