Optical Networks
Today’s bandwidth hungry systems demand extremely high speed communication links, even as your business operations grow. High-capacity optical networks meet the requirements by reliably transporting voice, video, data, and storage traffic independently over the same infrastructure. Benefits of optical networking in the enterprise include:
- Speed and capacity: Take advantage of the high-speed data transmission capabilities of today's optical systems (up to 10 Gbps per wavelength, or 320 Gbps on a single optical fiber). It's enough capacity to back up all your company's information and have additional bandwidth to support existing as well as new business applications.
- Business uptime: Keep your business operating with fully redundant optical systems capable of restoring to full operation in less than 50 milliseconds, a disruption undetectable by applications running over the network.
- Reduced cost and complexity: Cost-effectively consolidate your multiple networks-for voice, mainframe data, IP/Ethernet, and storage-onto a single multiservice optical network. Reducing complexity and simplifying network management help control costs and lower the time it takes to deploy new applications.
Key Enterprise Optical Networking Applications include:
- Data center/storage interconnect with certification from original storage manufacturers (OSMs)
- Cluster interconnect
- Campus interconnect
- Video
- Medical imaging/PACS
Optical solutions enable highly available, high-density aggregation between data centers. They provide the availability, capacity, cost, and distance requirements that you demand to meet your business continuance objectives. Their flexibility in aggregating multiple protocols makes them ideally suited for deploying highly efficient data center networking solutions. The following systems and protocols can be aggregated and transported over an optical network:
- Fibre Channel and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel
- Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet
- Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON)
- IBM Fiber Connection (FICON)
- Sysplex protocols
- Coupling link protocols
