Transition Networks’ ION Platform Now Globally Available

Transition Networks Inc., the fiber access technology expert, a wholly owned subsidiary of Communication Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ-GM:  JCS), is set to announce the general release of The ION Platform, a new family of intelligent optical networking devices designed to drive a new standard in optical networking.  Built to meet the increasing demand of today’s networks, the ION takes manageability and security in optical networking to a new level.  Network managers can now take advantage of fiber technology without having to compromise on reliability, scalability or security, and they can do it at a cost savings. Designed for both carrier class and enterprise network applications – the high density ION chassis is designed to operate in a central office (CO) or data center where multiple points of fiber integration are required.

ADDITIONAL ION RESOURCES

• ION Brochure
• Remote Monitoring Matrix
• Managing the Customer Premise Demarcation Self-Paced Training
• ION Press Release
• 802.1ag and Y.1731 NID Press Release
• Network Security Posts
•             HTTPS, SSL, and SSH
•             Radius Client
•             ACL Rules

Stay tuned for an overview of Transition’s complete line of 802.3ah and 802.1ag/Y.1731 Network Interface Devices which complete the ION Platform offering.

Starting at the lowest network level, CoS or Class of Service, is a way in which an Ethernet Frame can be identified by an administrator assigned value. In this case the scale is 0-7, 0 being the default for all traffic, 7 being the highest available value. This numbering scheme originated in 802.1P and is often times referred to as a P-bit.

Moving to the next networking level – the IP level, ToS or Type of Service, performs the exact same function but puts the value in the IP header of a packet. The scale of value is the same as with CoS; 0 being lowest priority and 7 being the highest priority.

Both of these numbers and classification values mean very little without creating system wide Quality of Service (QoS) policies for how networking equipment processes either IP packets or Ethernet frames. Most networking equipment comes with basic rules in place for processing traffic based on the ToS or CoS values but separate policy maps can be created as needed. For example, a QoS capable switch should by default process CoS level 7 packets before level 3.

From a processing standpoint, a router will be concerned only with the ToS bits contained within the header of an IP packet and a layer 2 switch will only be concerned with the CoS bits in the Ethernet frame. Many layer 2+ switches including those made by Transition Networks can recognize or translate both ToS bits and CoS bits enabling network administrators to move seamlessly between the two service identification types.

ToS RFC’s: (RFC 791, RFC 1122, RFC 1349, RFC 2474, and RFC 3168.)

Before we proceed, let’s cover who the IEEE PES is:

The IEEE Power & Energy Society is a worldwide, non-profit association of more than 24,000 members engaged in the electric power and energy industries. The society charter is to be the leading provider of scientific information on electric power and energy for the betterment of society and the preferred professional development source for its members. PES members are involved in the planning, research, development, construction, installation, and operation of equipment and systems for the safe, reliable, and economic generation, transmission, distribution, measurement, and control of electric energy.

The general meeting consisted of many panel discussions with research papers presented that focused largely on electrical power generation and power distribution. Continuing its reign as the hottest topic in the industry, many of the meeting subjects touched on the “Smart Grid Initiative” in the United States and other parts of the world. The Smart Grid moniker has several dimensions to it, including government funding and regulatory pieces, which are driving the direction of technology research and integration into the existing power distribution grids.

Due to the wide variety of subjects covered at the IEEE PES meeting and Transition’s core competency in data networking, the seminars that Chris attended tracked the efforts towards intelligent management of power distribution by using communication network designs that would enable such intelligence. It was emphasized that these networks need to have a high capacity to enable the quality monitoring of all the points in the network, enable fast control messages, and prioritized alarm and network timing traffic. As these networks are critical components to the fundamental operations and safety of the distribution systems – they must be highly robust, manageable, and very secure from unauthorized attacks. To address this, many meetings discussed Cyber Security driven by NIST standards, and IEC 61850 physical layer standards. The general consensus from the week’s meetings was that much work still needs to be done to develop a communications network that can safely and reliably deliver the promise of a next generation of highly efficient and diverse power distribution.

What are your thoughts on the state of Smart Grid?

As Transition Networks continues to expand its broad industrial portfolio, we are offering more and more fully-hardened Ethernet switches and media converters with certifications required for many varied vertical industries.

Recently, our High Port-count Industrial Managed switch, SISTM1040-262E-LRT, received GL Certification. Now, I know that we have all heard the term “GL Certified” used before. But what exactly does it mean?

About Germanischer Lloyd (GL)

Dating from 1867, Germanischer Lloyd (GL) is an independent classification society first concerned with reporting ship conditions to merchants, ship owners and insurance companies.  Over time GL has expanded its services to include certifying and classifying offshore oil platforms, and more recently, alternative energy installations such as wind turbines or fuel cells. 

GL ensures transparent representation of the industrial standards to which equipment is designed, with a particular emphasis on marine applications.  Trusted by governments and private industry world-wide, GL services today are available from 208 offices in 80 countries.

What GL Certified means for the SISTM1040-262E-LRT

GL certification ensures a product is safe and will meet performance requirements in a specific marine application.  For our SISTM1040-262E-LRT product, the GL certification coupled with the existing UL Class 1 Div 2 certification for use in Hazardous Locations assures customers the product can be used on ships, offshore oil rigs, refineries and other marine applications without risk of interfering with other equipment or igniting hazardous fumes.  In particular, GL certification ensures Transition Networks’ SISTM1040-262E-LRT will not interfere with shipboard radio communications.

GL:  Safety is a Primary Concern

As the world has watched the recent calamity in the Gulf of Mexico due to the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Platform, it has become clear that safety must be a primary, ongoing concern of companies and individuals operating in this industry.  Transition Networks’ newly GL-certified SISTM1040-262E-LRT can serve as an important building block in Industrial Ethernets constructed in these unique, dangerous, marine environments.

What is CWDM?

Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) is a technology that uses specific wavelengths of light to transmit multiple signals over a duplex single mode fiber pair. This technology is often used when leasing lines from a service provider, or in areas where an end-user has very limited fiber available for use.

CWDM uses 20nm narrow pass-bands to multiplex individual wavelengths in groups of 4, 8, or 16. While technically there are 18 bands beginning at 1270nm and extending to 1610nm, a 16-channel multiplexer will typically begin at 1310nm and extend to 1610nm.

How does Wideband apply to CWDM?

Most of the smaller channel-count multiplexers (i.e. the 4 and 8 channel muxes) will come with an option for what is referred to as a wideband 1310nm channel. Transition Networks accommodates this port in our 5 and 9 channel multiplexers (4 + 1310nm and 8 + 1310nm). This port is designed to pass a standard 1310nm signal. Typically the channel spacing for this port is 1270nm to 1350nm or more.

What about ZX (1550nm) optics?

A typical 1550nm “ZX” optic for Gigabit Ethernet has a transmit wavelength centered at 1550nm but with a tolerable range of 1480nm to 1580nm. This means that a ZX optic is functioning properly at 1550nm, but it also functions properly at 1481nm. It also means that if you were to purchase ten ZX optics, you would find a wide variety of transmission wavelengths between 1480nm and 1580nm and they all would be functioning within their specification.
At 10Gig speeds, “ZR” optics are a little tighter in their transmission range, going from 1530nm to 1565nm, but again an optic would be functioning properly at any wavelength between 1530nm and 1565nm.

Wavelength Fluctuation:

Imagine that you have purchased two ZX SFPs and you got lucky, out of the box – both optics are transmitting at 1550nm. Should you use them in the CWDM multiplexer? Again, you can do so but you should know that the range provided isn’t just a production range, but a functional range. For example, optics are somewhat temperature sensitive. If you have an optic at 15 degrees Celsius and it is transmitting at 1550nm, it could potentially change its wavelength to anywhere within its operating range at 20 degrees Celsius. This could cause your link to go down or function with errors. There are two other major factors that affect optical performance besides temperature; the age of the optic, and the atmospheric pressure.

All of these factors make up the reasons why the transmission wavelength of standard SFPs can vary so widely. It also explains why TN recommends the precision of CWDM specific SFPs/optics for WDM applications.

Hard QoS is a rigid system of dedicated bandwidth links, put in place to guarantee a minimum level of performance. Using a 100Mbps link for example, Voice traffic might be set to receive 20Mbps, data traffic (HTTP, Email, etc) might get 60Mbps and security video might get 20Mbps. Voice traffic may need a dedicated bandwidth of 20Mbps in order to ensure that no calls are dropped and that processing speeds are guaranteed end to end. Setting a hard QoS level such as 20Mbps means that 20Mbps is reserved for Voice calls only. If no Voice calls are being made, 20Mbps of bandwidth is unused and unavailable to other traffic – since it cannot be dynamically re-assigned. Essentially hard QoS guarantees a service level, but does not allow for “on the fly” adaptations based on current network usage.

Soft QoS on the other hand, is much more flexible but not as guaranteed. For example, consider the same 100Mbps link. In Soft QoS, that link would provide 100Mbps to any traffic type attempting to use the link. That means that if Voice traffic was trying to send 5Mbps instead of 100Mbps, the 95Mbps that was unused would be available for any type of other traffic. Soft QoS uses priority tags in the header of packets to identify to switches and routers what packets have a higher priority and need to be pushed through the queue faster than others. In less mission critical applications, where a minimum performance level is not necessary and a level of network flexibility is valued, soft QoS is a great fit.

The choice whether to employ hard QoS or soft QoS in your network is most often governed by the types of network traffic and applications you are planning on running. Hard QoS offers the benefit of guaranteed performance levels and bandwidth, but sacrifices a level of network flexibility. While soft QoS offers the utmost in flexibility and fits the bill for “good enough” applications, yet lacks that ability to set minimum performance levels – which may be a necessity for your network.

Our Remote Monitoring Matrix helps explain how operators manage Carrier Ethernet networks effectively and bring the operational values that have previously only been available in traditional TDM networks to advanced packet-based networks. Click here to download the matrix.

Globalization, virtualization, and mobile computing drive a seemingly insatiable demand for bandwidth, and only Carrier Ethernet efficiently scales up to meet this demand. Customers seeking high performance business Ethernet services can now easily purchase faster Ethernet connections at 10 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s and beyond. But sometimes users believe they are receiving lower throughput than they expected. This perception can be due to poor application performance which is caused by factors un-related to Ethernet service throughput. Many IP and application layer factors affect a user’s application experience when utilizing an Ethernet service, most of which are under their own direct control.

This MEF white paper presents an overview of the more common factors affecting Carrier Ethernet throughput, provides some pointers for getting more performance from higher layer protocols, and shows how to measure bandwidth throughput of a Carrier Ethernet service. The focus of the whitepaper is on E-Line services that are point to point. More sophisticated E-LAN and E-Tree services are influenced by the same factors plus some additional factors such as multicast/broadcast storms which are specific to their multi-point topologies.

You can download the entire white paper here.

                                                              This webinar is for Enterprise users of Carrier Ethernet services who want to better understand Carrier Ethernet services and how applications that utilize Carrier Ethernet can be tuned to run faster. Consisting of a presentation followed by an interactive panel/Q&A discussion, this event provides a concise overview of Carrier Ethernet services. Attendees will learn about some of the factors that can negatively impact throughput and application performance, as well as become familiar with basic methods for troubleshooting service performance.

To register or receive more information, click here.

Mode converters have been commonly deployed in applications where a user needs the distance of single mode fiber, but realizes their network fiber switch only offers a multimode port. Sure, you could physically connect a single mode (SM) fiber cable to a multimode (MM) fiber port, but this is not going to work. The fiber transmitters and receivers use different sources of light, as well as different optical wavelengths, for communicating over these two different types of fiber. Therefore a SM to MM media converter is needed to make this type of connection work.

Traditionally mode converters have worked quite well, however they have done so by only reamplifying the signal. This means if you wanted to make multiple connections between SM and MM fiber, you would need another device, like a switch, between the media converters to regenerate the signal. If you tried to link more that two SM to MM converters, back to back, in this type of daisy chain configuration, the received signal strength at the far end of your link would be so weak that you would risk dropping data or the loss of the link altogether.

The solution to this scenario is a media converter that will reamplify, reshape, and retime the signal. These are called the 3Rs. Below is a diagram that shows 3R regeneration. While reamplifying, reshaping, and retiming are shown individually, they really happen simultaneously.

This diagram came from an article on the OptoIQ website. This article is still relevant today as it discusses the importance of the 3Rs, especially as Gigabit network speeds increase to 10G, 40G and beyond.

At Transition Networks, we offer media converters that support 3R regeneration while converting single mode fiber to multimode fiber. This can be found in the stand-alone and chassis card versions of the xFMFF1314-280 Gigabit converters, as well as the xGFEBxxxx-140, -180, -150 and -170 families of Gigabit converters.

Just like there are no limits to how many switches that can be installed in a network, with 3R supported media converters, there are also no limits as to how many SM to MM converters you can install back to back in your network. Thanks to the 3Rs, you can feel free to daisy chain as many single mode to multimode converters as you need to meet your network’s requirements.