Financial firms worldwide face increasing pressures to ensure business continuity and protect vital information. It is no longer enough to rely on a nearby backup data center, and financial organizations in particular need secure, high availability networks that enable business continuity in the event of a failure at the primary location, and allow the organization to recover from natural—or unnatural—disasters.

Challenges

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) have become so critical to the economy that national governments are increasing regulatory controls. For example, financial firms in the U.S. are now required to meet BC/DR recommendations from the SEC, the Federal Reserve Board and the Comptroller of the Currency that stipulate that they have a data backup and recovery plan, alternate communications for customers and employees, and an alternate physical location. But having backup data centers hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from the main campus introduces a new set of connectivity requirements and challenges for ensuring cost control and performance.

Solution

Financial services organizations need the most reliable optical transport solutions that allow stored data to be transported to locations across regions, the continent, or across the ocean. This makes it possible to implement varied storage applications as a critical element of their BC/DR strategies. The network must be flexible in its support for numerous protocols and deliver the highest availability possible.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena's assured, adaptive network architecture provides financial services organizations with the foundation for high-performance, robust and flexible optical networks that scrap the service-specific interface approach that in the past made optical networks too expensive. Adaptive networks switch vast amounts of traffic at the physical layer, which is far more efficient and reliable than handling data at higher layers of the ISO stack. These flexible networks also deliver major networking advantages for supporting BC/DR programs, such as lower network risks, enhanced security, bandwidth optimization, business agility, a clear path to regulatory compliance and scalability.

Benefits

• Support BC/DR across any distance; Adaptive networks are already deployed in BC/DR applications across transcontinental and transoceanic distances
• High availability: Ciena solutions provide five-9s (99.999%) and six9s (99.9999%) availability—less than 31 seconds of downtime per year
• Multiprotocol hardware-based data compression, efficient protocol mapping and dynamic bandwidth allocation significantly enhance bandwidth utilization
• Minimized latency and maximized throughput achieves highest performance for storage connectivity
• Software-tunable ports on both the input (Fibre Channel, ESCON®, FICON® and GbE) and output (SONET/SDH, dark fiber, WDM and GbE) sides, Ciena minimizes capital expense and maximizes flexibility and scalability
• Ciena's assured, adaptive network solutions can eliminate external switching/routing equipment for many scenarios so financial institutions can reduce equipment costs