Cisco upgrades for optical connectivity leadership

ONS 15454 multi-service transport platform upgrade to enhance datacentre connectivity

Cisco has upgraded its ONS 15454 multi-service transport platform (MSTP) to version 7. Cisco EMEA optical business development manager, Johann Strauss, said that the upgrade should enable enterprises to significantly enhance their datacentre connectivity.

Massimo Cambiaghi, EMEA optical product manager, added, "The enhancements to Cisco's ONS platform focus on three major categories with the first being to improve the efficiencies and the aggregation capabilities on the platform itself, the second part is to extend the scalability of the platforms capacity-wise and also in terms of the type of traffic we can carry over our platform and the third is to allow efficient service management and monitoring of these new capabilities.", added Cambiaghi.

One of the main hardware enhancements is a new 10Gbit/s data muxponder allowing firms to aggregate data and storage protocols over a single optical wavelength, "This multiplexes lower bit rate traffic into a 10Gbit wavelength, for instance 8 gigabit Ethernet streams, 8 x 1Gbit/s fibre channel (FC) streams, 4 x 2Gbit/s FC streams or 2 x 4Gbit/s FC streams. This 10Gbit stream can then be transmitted over dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM).”

Cisco said that the upgrade allows 40Gbit/s transport capability and also has 'alien lambda' support, which allows direct interconnection of routers and switches, including some third party switches, allowing transponder-less operation.

The hardware upgrades have already been implemented by UK network service provider FiberNet under a contract to provide network connectivity to international legal practice, Allan and Overy LLP.

Cisco said that a DWDM network that has 5 or more WDM wavelengths lit should be able to demonstrate capital savings by using reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology as opposed to fixed WDM solutions and added that all the optical interconnect hardware released with version 7 had been qualified by enterprise storage vendors such as EMC, HP, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. Cisco refused to release starting price details.