Telecom Ottawa will be pitching the federal government for converged network services with a new suite of products that facilitate high-bandwidth communication and extended storage area networks.
The latest offerings include synchronous optical networking (SONET), wave division multiplexing (WDM) and storage extension, based on platforms from Ciena Corp. of Linthicum, Md.
The suite is designed to provide government agencies, as well as enterprise companies and carriers, with reliable and high-performance connectivity, according to Jacques Taillefer, acting chief operating officer and vice-president of sales for Tele-com Ottawa.
“Telecom Ottawa recently qualified for the supply agreement for converged network services (CNS) for the Canadian federal government,” said Taillefer. “The federal government has expressed their interest in these services as part of a shared services initiative for telecommunications services.
“The SONET services defined in the CNS supply agreement are point-to-point. However, should individual client federal government departments or agencies wish to pursue SONET ring service, with full 50 millisecond fail-over redundancy, this service can be supported by Telecom Ottawa.”
SONET, which defines optical carrier (OC) levels and synchronous transport signals, is used to connect with a range of equipment, including routers, multiplexers and switches, for extending high-bandwidth applications across an optical network, according to Taillefer.
WDM can support higher rates than SONET and is protocol independent. “For example, an OC12 SONET interface at 622Mbps would not be fast enough to support a 1Gbps Ethernet link or a 2Gbps Fibre Channel link. A WDM connection can support a 2.5Gbps link and can even support a 10Gbps link,” said Taillefer.
Ciena’s Online Metro Multiservice DWDM transport platform has been deployed by Telecom Ottawa as the foundation for delivering the new services. Based on the agreement between the two companies, Telecom Ottawa also can deploy Ciena’s CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform and CN 2600 Multiservice Edge Aggregator based on customer needs or additional service expansion.
“In the federal government, where there are many separate data centres across multiple geographic locations, it may be a worthwhile project to link the data centres together,” said Taillefer.
“In a storage area network (SAN) extension, data storage arrays that are used to store vast amounts of data may have extra capacity that could be shared between data centres.”
“In the past, storage area networks were unable to be extended across any significant distance because the protocols, such as FC, that were developed for SANs are very high-speed (1Gbps to 2Gbps). With the new services available from Telecom Ottawa, these distances can now be bridged.”
“Government communications require-ments are changing drastically to support real-time decision-making and inter-agency collaboration, so the performance and reliability of multi-site wide area networks is critical,” said Mike Aquino, vice-president of Americas Sales for Ciena.
“Our Adaptive WAN solution is a set of multiservice transport and switching platforms that serve as building blocks for creating networks that are always available, never drop traffic and deliver predictable network performance.”
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