Bill Owens, the new president of Nortel Networks, is surprised by the high degree of loyalty that carrier and enterprise customers show for his company. He's also surprised that a moniker he's been trying to shake for years continues to stick.
Nortel Networks Corp. announced Tuesday that it has added Fibre Channel storage over synchronous optical networks (SONET) to its product offerings, allowing carriers that use the company's optical switches to offer customers the ability to transmit block-level data over thousands of miles for replication and backup.
Amidst downsizing and budget constraints, businesses looking to extend services and applications through fibre optic cables still require quality assurance. While test and measurement can be a cumbersome and expensive task, one company says it will do the dirty work.
In a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper international telephone calls and Internet leased lines, engineers at Mitsubishi Electric have succeeded in sending 1.3Tbps of data down a fibre-optic cable 8,400 kilometres in length.
Until now, storage-area networks have mostly been local networks, providing high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect for the high-speed movement of block data from server to storage.
Faced with a plummeting stock market and depleted sales, networking giants Cisco Systems Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. are refocusing their optical strategies, either by offering products aimed at specific segments of the market or spinning off optical units altogether.