In separate announcements, Cisco and Nortel this week unveiled products and product enhancements designed to enable service providers to offer new services over metro optical networks.
The announcements were made at the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) and exhibition in Orlando, Fla.
Cisco announced the SL-Series interface for its ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP). The card is designed to enable delivery of Fibre Channel-based storage-area network (SAN) extension services over SONET networks.
The SL-Series interface supports four gigabit-interface-converter (GBIC)-based ports, each capable of 1G bit/sec and 2G bit/sec rates.
An ONS 15454-based network can use existing ML-Series Ethernet switching and new SL-Series interfaces to provide SAN-extension services using native Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, or Fibre Channel over IP with standards-based generic framing procedure-transparent (GFP-T) and virtual concatenation technology, Cisco says. The SL-Series interface will also support Fibre Channel-transport services at subrates, which can enable managed service providers to offer SAN-extension services to their customers, Cisco says.
The SL-Series interface is currently being certified by storage companies IBM, EMC and HP, Cisco says.
Some analysts were guarded in their assessment of Cisco’s SL-Series rollout.
“Cisco is committing to year-end 2003 development of GFP-T technology, which it very much needs, while building additional revenue opportunities with enterprises and service providers with a TDM-based access network,” says Dave Dunphy of Current Analysis. “But multivendor SONET/SDH interoperability issues reduce the impact of the distance capabilities; subrate services at OC-12 may be a hard sale due to available access ring bandwidth and cost of network upgrades; and Cisco will have plenty of competition sooner than it can sway much market share with this first SL- series card.”
Cisco currently offers DWDM-based SAN services over the ONS 15530 and ONS 15540 platforms.
The SL-Series interface is scheduled to be available by year-end.
Nortel said it plans to extend the reach of its OPTera Metro 5200 DWDM system so service providers can locate redundant data centers more remotely from the ‘home office’ for security purposes. Greater reach will also reduce network costs by as much as 50%, Nortel claims.
Nortel intends to deliver these enhancements in two phases. In the first phase, scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter, OPTera Metro 5200 will support 350 kilometers over 2.5G bit/sec channels and 110 kilometers over 10G bit/sec channels without dispersion compensation.
The second phase, scheduled for availability in the first quarter of 2004, will extend this reach to as much as 600 kilometers over 10G bit/sec channels.
Dunphy was neutral on Nortel’s plans.
“While it increases the competitive position of the product line, Nortel was starting to fall behind on distance capabilities and needed to upgrade them to prevent erosion in its strong incumbent position as the leading vendor globally in metro DWDM,” he says. “Nortel’s first planned release will bring it to a more competitive position, and its second planned release for additional distance capabilities will make it more strongly competitive – but Nortel is playing catch-up to the market on this metric.”
