Business need

In an increasingly competitive telecom environment, service providers are looking for solutions to generate high-margin revenues based on new, differentiated services. Their enterprise customers are looking to protect business information with Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery solutions that interconnect data centers or multiple locations over the Metropolitan Area Network/Wide Area Network (MAN/WAN). The network solution must be qualified with leading data replication applications. In addition, enterprises would like to reduce network costssignificantly by consolidating bandwidth services to one or two service providers. Storage extension services offer service providers a means for new revenue and differentiation from other providers vying for the consolidated business.

Challenges

One key requirement in offering a new service is minimizing the upfront capital outlay to prepare the infrastructure to support the new services. As storage extension requirements can vary greatly, it is critical to meet multiple performance and interoperability requirements in a single solution. Once the service is technically available, a key hurdle is training your sales teams to understand and sell the new services.

Solution

This challenge requires a storage extension solution that can be deployed quickly and easily to speed time to market, and also must be flexible enough to meet enterprise requirements for disk mirroring, tape, clustering and other data center traffic. Using a combination of storage over SONET/SDH, GbE, and WDM solutions provides a service provider the options to meet the breadth of storage extension requirements without having to replace existing infrastructure. Enterprises benefit from high-bandwidth, affordable, low-latency connectivity and increased network efficiency to support high-performance replication applications. Service providers gain an important new revenue-generating service and improved competitive differentiation. An enterprise can select the optical storage connectivity solution that best matches its application requirements while meeting the cost and performance goals of its distance extension implementation.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena offers multiple best-in-class storage extension solutions for dark fiber, and MAN/WAN services over SONET/SDH/GbE infrastructure. Such solutions allow multiple data center services (Fibre Channel, ESCON®, FICON® and GbE) to be aggregated, while maintaining the low latency, application isolation and security required by enterprises. Ciena's storage extension products have been qualified with all the major storage vendors including EMC®, IBM®, HP®, Hitachi Data Services®, and Brocade®, and provide the optimal solution, whether your customer is moving 1 TB across town or 50 TB across the country. In addition to providing the service hardware and software infrastructure, Ciena offers the training and storage expertise required to ensure a successful launch and adoption of the service.

Benefits

• Deliver the high-value services that bring rich differentiation to your enterprise portfolio
• Add new accounts and drive higher revenues through high-performance services that offer low latency, high throughput, and detailed monitoring
• Reduce enterprise capital costs and push margins higher using a flexible solution for any storage extension application (elimination of switches/routers, software-tunable equipment)