In episode 1 our hero, stuck in a tangle of outdated networking equipment, services and complexity, realizes that with business Ethernet as his WAN technology of choice, he can complement the existing network set-up and connect his branch offices, while handling massive volumes of traffic concurrently using high speed (up to 100G) high-performance Ethernet connectivity.

However, this was not his only network problem. The traditional Local Area Network (LAN) connections were plagued by latency and jitter. Users simply would NOT use underperforming applications or services.

To our hero, this is not good enough. His business’ users have high expectations. They want connectivity options and performance that are reliable, secure, on-demand and cost-effective. Our hero knows that the network can play a very valuable role. Only the network can manage the quality of the connection and ensure optimal end-user experience for everything else. This makes the network more important than ever – and a differentiator for the business; but only if it can provide the best possible assurance for each service by ensuring latency, security and speed.

With his friend, advanced business Ethernet, our hero can mitigate legacy network complexities, sidestep the public internet and increase network performance. He can also maintain links to traditional networks and applications while keeping pace with fluctuating usage demands.  Our hero can now modernize his network. He can move toward next-generation operations and embrace hybrid capabilities for a variety of uses. Connections can be increased from 1G to 10G and higher – up to 100G to connect to data centers or transfer massive files like MRI scans, uncompressed video, design prototypes, and so on.

With persistence and dedication, our hero makes progress, leveraging business Ethernet to increase capacity, improve operational performance and keep users happily and easily connected to the cloud, hosted resources and applications, whenever they need them.

By increasing flexibility, agility, scalability and security, our hero now realizes that high-capacity business Ethernet-based technologies offer his best hope of keeping up with competitors – some of whom have nimbly sprinted ahead, winning customers away with their abilities to quickly develop new apps and services.

To stay successful, he now understands enterprise networks must be agile and adaptable to both customer and employee expectations. And he knows that business Ethernet extension solutions have been built with the future in mind, robust and high-performance enough to support software-defined networks (SDN), network function virtualisation (NFV) and other innovations that he is now eager to explore and embrace.

Follow Our Hero’s story in Part 3 as he embraces Ethernet connectivity and takes advantage of the bandwidth, resiliency and flexibility his organization desperately needs…

To find out more about Ciena’s Business Ethernet options for best-in-class service delivery and aggregation please visit //www.ciena.com/products/packet-networking/