Ciena Insights Blog

Gaming the Optical Control Plane

Bo Gowan — Fri May 25 08:15:00 PDT 2012

Earlier this week Ciena unveiled our new OneConnect intelligent optical control plane (see OneConnect: This is an optical control plane).

One of the benefits of Ciena's new OneConnect intelligent optical control plane is the ability to enable auto-discovery, automated provisioning and virtual point-and-click service creation, as well as automated link restoration in milliseconds instead of seconds or minutes.

So what better way to demonstrate the near point-and-click capabilities of our control plane than by creating a OneControl game where you score points by quickly clicking a path between nodes through the network.

And that's exactly what we've done with our OneConnect Control Plane game, a fun (but still educational) take on the intelligent optical control plane.

To encourage you to play, we're giving away a OneConnect Control Plane T-shirt to the top 3 high scores by the end of May (just enter your name when recording your score, we'll use the honor system after that for verification).

Just click below to take your best shot at the high score.

But make no mistake, the capabilities of Ciena's new control plane are no game. In fact, a recent Infonetics survey of global service providers found that control plane capabilities were the #2 most important factor that set vendors apart during evaluation (see Infonetics: Carriers say Ciena top optical vendor).

With that in mind, we've been pushing the importance of control plane this week to industry pubs as part of our OneConnect unveiling. Generally the topic of control plane isn't one that gets your heart racing, but so far the message has been well-received:

Ciena SVP Tom Mock and product marketing director Theresa Cauble were interviewed by LightWave Online for this article that highlights how OneConnect fits into the broader software-defined network (SDN) market that is getting so much attention lately.
Tom Mock also talked to Sean Buckley of FierceTelecom on our plans to extend the OneConnect control plane to Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform.

EMC World: Breaking down the data center walls

Bo Gowan — Thu May 24 08:59:00 PDT 2012

This week I joined several of my teammates and many in the industry for EMC World in Las Vegas. EMC, one of the market leaders in enterprise cloud and storage solutions, invites many of its partners to speak and exhibit at this annual event (and Ciena was one of the show’s Elite Sponsors).

This was my first time to attend EMC World, and it was a very different experience than my regular rotation of optical trade shows and events. An event record 13,000 attendees walked the halls of the conference and exhibit floor, a total that eclipses the attendee count at OFC/NFOEC, the largest optical event in the industry.

The deep focus on technical papers you would see at OFC/NFOEC or the extensive lab demos from Ciena’s own CVS event were replaced with a “big event” feel of glitz and glamour that was undoubtedly helped by the fact that we were in Vegas.

On display were general session areas with bean bag seating, Darth Vader was roaming the show floor, there was a 3-story tall Transformer on display (an analogy for the need to transform your enterprise), magicians were performing tricks to entice people into one vendor’s booth, a Harley Davidson complete with a Terminator look-alike was at another, and a Maroon5 concert helped top off the conference (see pictures below).

Ciena even got into the act a bit with our latest video “data redemption,” which put a dark underworld spin on the need to break down the walls between data centers.

But there was still serious business going on at EMC World. The wide array of conference sessions (where Ciena had several speakers) were very well attended. For example, it wasn't unusual to see 200+ people sitting in on a session detailing some of EMCs storage features.

All things cloud were on display, and Ciena’s goal at EMC World was to introduce our Data Center without Walls concept to a relatively new audience. I was able to talk to two of our cloud experts, Jim Morin and Ian Harris, about the evolution of cloud computing and virtualization.

First the advent of virtual machines helped significantly improve server utilization. Next came the development of virtual storage systems that simplified the management of distributed databases and file systems. Ciena’s Data Center without Walls concept is the next step in this process, virtualizing the management of network resources across the WAN to enable a more flexible and reliable shared data center infrastructure.

The reception to our story has been encouraging, as seen by this article in InformationWeek. But we are just beginning in the education and awareness of this concept. For many of the attendees at EMC World, wandering “outside the walls” of the local data center is new territory. We’ll keep trying to break down those walls.

For more pictures see our EMC World album on Facebook.

OneConnect: This is an optical control plane

Bo Gowan — Wed May 23 05:15:00 PDT 2012

Last week on this blog we posed the question: What is an optical control plane? Yesterday we answered that question and detailed the benefits of using one with the introduction of Ciena's OneConnect intelligent optical control plane.

With OneConnect, Ciena is taking over a decade of experience in developing control plane technology for the core network and extending it across metro, access, and long-haul submarine networks. This experience includes live field deployments in some of the world’s largest, most demanding networks, representing thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of circuits.

That includes Verizon, which has been using Ciena's control plane technology for years and just last week announced its intent to expand the use of control plane technology across its network (see New Verizon strategy expands control plane, takes 100G to the metro).

But while big, complex meshed networks may be top of mind when you think of control plane deployments, its not just Tier 1 global network operators that are taking advantage of the capabilities of control plane technology.

Case in point is Indiana Fiber Network (INF), a fiber optic network owned by a consortium of 20 independent telephone companies that interconnects eight metro ring networks and 23 points of presence across the state of Indiana (see yesterday's press release for more details). In fact, Ciena's control plane technology is already in use by tier 1 operators, regional networks, and even enterprises.

So what exactly can Ciena's OneConnect intelligent control plane provide? The most obvious capability is link restoration, with the combination of OneConnect and a fully meshed network architecture combining to enable unprecedented 99.9999 percent (six-9s) reliability.

Auto-discovery, automated provisioning and virtual point-and-click service creation is also enabled, allowing operators to provide differentiated services and respond rapidly to customer requests.

But OneConnect is about much more than just these two most commonly sighted features of a control plane. OneConnect creates, manages and restores bandwidth services faster, and with a richer set of policy options, than competitive control plane offerings.

For example, network operators can prioritize latency-aware routing capabilities to help ensure that time-sensitive applications are routed across the network with the lowest latency possible. Parameters may also be pre-determined and set to meet particular SLA or customer requirements. Network operators who use this feature, rather than relying on latency-blind provisioning, can benefit from as much as 30 percent reduction in average service latency.

New virtualized Optical VPN services are also possible with Ciena OneConnect, allowing service providers to boost revenue potential by leveraging their existing switched infrastructure to offer secure, private line services over a virtual fiber network. For example, a service provider can offer dynamic bandwidth-on-demand services to deliver low-latency HD video during a major sporting event or concert.

An example of Optical-VPN capabilities enabled by Ciena OneConnect

To learn more about Ciena's OneConnect intelligent optical control plane, visit the new OneConnect microsite on ciena.com.

Philippe Morin: Seeing our growth in submarine networking

Philippe Morin — Tue May 22 07:59:00 PDT 2012

Philippe Morin is Senior Vice President, Global Field Operations at Ciena, with responsibility for leading the company’s global sales and services organizations.

Last week I attended International Telecoms Week (ITW) 2012 in Chicago, a ‘must attend’ event for anyone doing business in submarine networks.

I came away from the event more enthusiastic than ever about Ciena’s progress in the submarine networking market, and wanted to share with you some of my impressions.

To understand how far we’ve come at Ciena, let me take you back a few years. We first started attending ITW four years ago, a time when we were just looking to get into the submarine market. Our goal was to leverage our coherent optical technology to help submarine operators upgrade their existing cable.

Back then, we were literally “chasing meetings,” trying to break into what was considered a closed club where only a few traditional submarine vendors supplied a relatively conservative customer base.

Now fast forward to this year’s conference, which was a completely different experience. Our schedule was packed, with 3 days of back-to-back meetings with customers from every region. Ciena is now seen as a “required conversation” by operators before they make any major decisions and being recognized as a submarine networks specialist.

Just as important, the conversations we’re having today are much different than in the past. Four years ago, the focus with early customers was about optical transport and how many wavelengths we could enable. Today, our conversations center around mesh networking, low latency and a more strategic relationship based on end-to-end solutions.

The submarine market itself has gone from a conservative closed club into probably the most dynamic market that we are addressing. The focus has moved from beach-to-beach applications to POP-to-POP – how do you go all the way back into your backhaul and metro network with a seamless solution between submarine and terrestrial networks. This market transition favors Ciena and our portfolio strategy.

For me, our success in submarine is also a great proof point in our thrust to become a more global company. We have now won and deployed multiple Atlantic submarine upgrades, and in both APAC and CALA we’ve won a high percentage of the recent submarine upgrade tenders. This represents tremendous momentum in our submarine efforts and our global presence.

In closing, my experience last week at ITW confirmed that Ciena is a leader in the submarine upgrade market and our relevancy with our global customer base continues to increase. I’m excited about our direction, and I’m looking forward to keeping you informed about our progress.

The question of Iceland and 100G

Bo Gowan — Mon May 21 06:45:00 PDT 2012

This week several of my Ciena collegues are in Iceland for the TERENA Networking Conference 2012, hosted by the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA).

Our Ciena team has been working feverishly to bring several booth demonstrations online, with help from a consortium of research institutions including CERN, SURFnet, NORDUnet, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The most interesting of these demos is a 100G submarine network that spans more than 2,200km of undersea fiber, and approximately 4,000km in total, to connect Iceland to Denmanrk. This demo marks the first time ever that 100G optical transport has been connected to the island country of Iceland.

The immediate question that came to mind when I heard about this 100G feat was this: why exactly does Iceland need 100G optical transport?

It’s a country roughly the size of Kentucky and with only 300,000 people. So why the need to demonstrate 100G submarine capabilities for a population that seemingly can’t fill such a huge pipe?

The answer (at least in part) is data centers, and Iceland’s ongoing effort to become a major data center hub connecting Europe to the U.S. Over the last few years, Iceland has been promoting its unique combination of cool climate and cheap geothermal energy sources as a perfect mix for reducing the cost of data center facilities -- and those efforts have already met with some early success.

But as Ciena's cloud expert Jim Morin put it when talking about Iceland's data center efforts, "no data center can be an island" (pun intended). And as such, Iceland's fate as a data center hub has just as much to do with high-speed, low latency connectivity to the island as it does the cheap energy and cooling resources on the island itself.

That's where this week's 100G submarine demo comes in. Whether its a data center replication for companies with locations on both sides of the Atlantic, or to help with the huge data flows that come with R&E networks, Iceland's future looks to be a much more connected one.

From left to right: David Diep (Ciena), Marc Lyonnais (Ciena), Rod Wilson (Ciena), and Ralph Koning (Researcher from University of Amsterdam) put the finishing touches on a demo on the Ciena booth at the TERENA Networking Conference 2012.

Ciena sponsors Cape Cod regional broadband summit

Chris Janson — Fri May 18 13:11:00 PDT 2012

Chris Janson is a senior product manager in Ciena’s industry marketing group where he is presently focused on the needs of government, research and educational customers.

Roughly 460 people gathered at a waterfront Cape Cod hotel on May 14 and 15 to report progress and exchange ideas on regional economic development empowered by broadband networks. The SmarterCape Summit 2012 enjoyed active participation from local community leaders, government officials and industry.

At the center of discussion was utilization of the OpenCape 100Gbps broadband network, a 350 mile fiber-optic backbone that promises to offer state-of-the-art IT capabilities to Cape Cod, the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and southeastern Massachusetts.

Funded through a series of grants from the county, state and federal government, OpenCape is a non-profit community effort formed by people interested in improving regional connectivity and the broader economic impact of a well-oiled communications infrastructure on healthcare, education, energy, transportation, public safety, environment and commerce.

The OpenCape vision is a network that empowers applications to build a “Smarter” Cape Cod. OpenCape will not offer last mile service; it is a middle-mile public resource with connectivity provided to selected points in the region. Anchor tenant users will access the network and purchase service through CapeNet, a separate private company that OpenCape has contracted to construct and operate the network.

Initial users include the Massachusetts Air National Guard and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Construction across the region will be completed by January of 2013 with 1GbE access points installed in each town within Barnstable County.

The summit featured keynote presentations and break out discussions that provided detail on the SmarterCape vision and case studies to illustrate the effect of similar efforts in localities across the US, Canada and Europe. Participants from many different backgrounds and affiliations offered ideas and needs for how applications could help the community.

At the local government level, the intent is to bundle IT needs for each locality under an umbrella of services for public safety, permitting, tax assessment and other citizen needs. Linkages for libraries, schools and hospitals were also discussed. One environmental application is a wastewater impact tool that will help towns and residents understand their individual impact upon Cape Cod’s sole source aquifer.

A common theme across the summit was that the network is about far more than improving internet access or cellular phone service. The longer term the intent is for OpenCape to become a public asset that improves the region’s quality of life and economic health for the next 100 years.

Ciena’s 6500 packet optical transport platform and Carrier Ethernet Switching systems were selected for use throughout the network (see CapeNet to deploy Ciena 100G for Massachusetts middle mile network).

Creating a data center without walls

Jim Morin — Thu May 17 14:19:00 PDT 2012

Jim Morin is Product Line Director, Managed Services & Enterprise, and Ciena’s resident expert on Cloud Networking. Jim is one of several Ciena speakers at next week’s EMC World 2012 conference in Las Vegas.

The enterprise IT world as we know it is undergoing a revolution. In the traditional model, an enterprise organization’s business critical applications are supported by an ecosystem of servers, storage systems and networks that are built by the company's IT department via an on-premise data center that it owns and manages.

It is a model that has worked for decades, but it is also one that requires a tremendous commitment of resources and budget and is restricted by the enterprise’s own computing, storage and networking capabilities.

The cloud is now fundamentally changing this – creating a shift that is forever transforming both the way data is being managed and the nature and economics of IT delivery.

The promise of Cloud Service Providers is their ability to store, process, and move data – as needed – in remote, virtual environments. These on-demand deployments of IT resources offer more agility, scalability, resiliency and efficiency than an enterprise organization could ever accomplish within its own walls.

However, current cloud utility is restricted by today’s inadequate cloud networks. On one side, the Internet is ubiquitous but its performance is lacking. While on the other side, conventional private line or VPN services provide the required performance demands, but their ‘always on’ nature makes them too expensive at high bandwidths.

Because most networks today simply don’t deliver the right performance and economics needed for cloud services, we have only begun to scratch the surface of what the cloud model can offer.

Ciena is now changing this, delivering faster, smarter and more affordable networks that can advance the cloud toward its full potential as a high-performance service delivery platform that breaks free from current cost and performance barriers.

The result is what we call a Data Center Without Walls.

The Data Center Without Walls uses the network to seamlessly connect a larger pool of resources shared between both enterprise and provider data centers.

It creates an entirely new IT model that federates enterprise customer data centers with multiple geographically distributed cloud provider data centers to unlock the full power of cloud computing. All network and datacenter assets become virtualized and pooled, enabling fluid placement and migration of workloads according to changing needs.

As a result, cloud service performance, resiliency and economics are all improved.

Organizations can now own their own data center for base operations and simply ‘rent the spike’ – on demand – from cloud service providers when workload demands exceed the on-premise data center capacity – a model referred to as a hybrid cloud environment. Or they can choose to move everything to the cloud to take advantage of its improved economies of scale.

Next week at EMC World 2012, Ciena will be demonstrating this concept of a data center without walls. We will create a simulated hybrid cloud between our show floor booth and our mobile innovation lab truck, and demonstrate a variety of scenarios that show how intelligent, scalable network connectivity, with minimal latency and dynamic performance, can enable providers to deliver IT as a flexible, efficient and reliable service.

Visit us at booth #537 and #637 to hear more about Data Center Without Walls and see the concept in action.

http://www.emcworld.com/index.htm

An overflow of 100G customers

Bo Gowan — Thu May 17 07:29:00 PDT 2012

Do a Google News search for the term “100G” and you’re likely to find articles for the following topics:

VimpelCom deploys 100G in Russia
Ciena lights Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s 100G European link
euNetworks rolls out 100 Gigabit capable network across Europe
Verizon to offer 100G links, resilient mesh on optical networks

Yes, it has a very busy week for 100G news, and for Ciena (see tag: 100G). In fact, it's been so busy that on this blog we haven’t even had a chance yet to crow about our newest 100G customer euNetworks, which yesterday announced that it is connecting eight major cities across Europe with Ciena 100G technology -- Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Dublin, and Manchester.

euNetworks says the 100G deployment satisfies demand “both for greater capacity and 100G circuits,” and the European operator is just the latest indicator that 100G optical transport is truly moving from early adoption to mainstream deployment.

Except, wait, as of this morning we already have a new “newest” 100G customer. This morning Ciena announced that SSE Telecoms, the UK’s fourth largest telecoms operator, has selected Ciena as its exclusive provider of 100G technology for deployment across its UK national network (and the 100G network is already live).

The mains driver of SSE Telecom’s 100G deployment are the connectivity of data centers across Britain and the introduction of new high-capacity services. But the operator has realized a variety of OPEX benefits as well, including a 46% reduction in power consumption and a 70% reduction in footprint when compared to a traditional architecture based on 10G technology.

Both euNetworks and SSE Telecoms are using the 100G capabilities of Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform equipped with our WaveLogic coherent optical processors. And as with several other recently announced Ciena 100G customers, both have also been able to add 100G wavelengths alongside existing in-service 40G channels on their network with the simplicity of adding a 100G line card.

As industry pub Telecom Ramblings put it in this recent article, “this is definitely looking like the year 100G goes mainstream.” If the last few weeks of Ciena 100G news is any indicator, then that statement is looking to be right on target.

In fact, Ciena has now shipped more than 14,000 coherent 40G/100G line interfaces to more than 120 customers across the globe, with nearly 13 million coherent kilometers deployed worldwide. And while it’s great to be able to see numbers like that, it’s even better for me to be able to talk about specific customer names and deployments in such abundance that I’m having a hard time keeping up with them here on our blog.

It's All About Open

Steve Alexander, Chief Technology Officer, Ciena — Wed May 16 05:05:00 PDT 2012

Steve Alexander is Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Products and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, and counts more than 20 years in the telecoms industry. In today’s post, Steve discusses open standards and the recently unveiled Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) guidelines.

The use of open standards has been one of the fundamental “change agents” in the networking industry and it’s a bedrock part of Ciena’s technology DNA. When we started the company, we adopted a “superset of the existing standards approach” that created the industry’s first truly open DWDM system.

We repeated that approach as a co-founder of the Optical Inter-Networking Forum (OIF) and its control-plane based OIF interoperability events. More recently, we’ve used coherent optics and advanced digital signal processing to introduce open systems into the historically highly-proprietary submarine cable industry to enable 100G Ethernet services that cross oceans.

Open standards are most often associated with encouraging creativity by enabling a diverse and rapidly expanding user group, and once they become widespread, open standards generally support the most cost-effective scaling, too. We can see a time in the near future where the combination of increasing network intelligence combined with the use of open standards-based network programming interfaces (NPIs) enables physical network resources to be virtualized, just as we today routinely work with virtualized compute and storage resources.

This combination of connect (the networking function) with compute and store, to allow us to build more capable and efficient infrastructure machines, will be key if we are to enable infrastructure to grow by 10X and 100X while not costing 10X or 100X as much.

Last week, another key piece needed to enable a scalable infrastructure was unveiled . The new Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) from IBM is on its way to becoming industry best-practice for transforming data-centers, utilizing open standards to achieve cost-effective scaling while supporting a flatter, more converged network architecture.

This looks to be a nearly ideal approach to allow the connect, compute, and store resources to be virtualized and operationally united for simplicity and scale, and Ciena is pleased to support the ODIN initiative to help achieve this through open standards.

The Wide Area Network, including networks operated by carriers, will be a critical component of the combined “platform infrastructure” and Ciena looks forward to leading the development and inclusion of this component within the framework.

Ciena adds two new names to its public customer list

Bo Gowan — Tue May 15 11:18:00 PDT 2012

Ciena today added two new names to its public customer list in the form of VimpelCom and Perseus Telecom. Together, the two new customer deployments show Ciena's increasing leadership in two competitive markets.

1st 100G deployment in Russia

In the case of VimpelCom, a global telecoms service provider with major operations in Russia, Ciena's coherent 100G optical transport technology has been deployed across a critical 587km route connecting the Russian citites of Ufa and Samara to accommodate the need for additional core network capacity. The live link is believed to be the first ever 100G commercial deployment in Russia.

As an existing (though unannounced) Ciena 40G customer, VimpelCom was able to leverage its existing Ciena 6500 infrastructure and simultaneously run 40G and 100G wavelengths across the network. This simple "plug-and-play" upgrade to 100G is one that we also highlighted last week with Cable&Wireless Worldwide (see Cable&Wireless goes 100G with Ciena).

ADV Consulting, a Ciena Platinum BizConnect partner, was instrumental in the implementation phase of the project.

Trans-Atlantic low latency

Perseus Telecom is a global telecom provider with a focus on ultra low-latency networks. Last month Perseus announced a new ultra-low latency submarine link across the Atlantic in partnership with Reliance Globalcom (see that release here). Called QuanTA, the trans-Altantic cable stretches from Long Island, New York to Lands End, United Kingdom.

But Perseus didn't stop at the beach head with its low latency network. Perseus has selected Ciena’s equipment, software and services to build an end-to-end, ultra low-latency network that spans metro and submarine infrastructure to connect the global financial hubs of New York City, New Jersey, London and Frankfurt.

Equipment deployed in the build includes Ciena's 6500 platform for the trans-Atlantic link, and the Ciena 4200 Advanced Services Platform and 5150 Service Aggregation Switch in each metro tuned as ultra low-latency access points to QuanTA and the global trading markets.

This end-to-end vision of low-latency submarine networks was the recent focus of a blog post by our submarine networking expert Brian Lavallée (see Low Latency submarine networks: Don’t stop at the beach)