Summer 2014

It is summer 2014.

As the decisions as to what data center location and fiber providers were underway the decision to pick both the optical equipment manufacturer and quantity of equipment along with the level of spares that would be bought.

Where HA requirements currently exist multiple chassis, stacking or other clustering technologies have been selected over single box solutions; scaling horizontally versus vertically has seemed to work well in the past.

Single chassis solutions were ruled out, even if they were 9 - 9's reliable.  The fiber paths would end up crossing multiple State, county and city jurisdictions, over flood prone rivers, cross national rail lines and Interstate highways to rural county roads. A failure or maintenance need at the wrong location or time could isolate thousands of users from their applications and data.

Part way through the fiber carrier discussions it was found that one of the existing locations might end up with the east and west fiber paths running along the same road so an alternate pathway to the west needed to be found.  A business partner located 2 miles away had 48 pairs of fiber that could be utilized to provide a diverse path if we could trench over to them. Being good partners we agreed to provide them an extra optical product so that they could use the other portions of our ring to provide them diversity as well.

Cisco ONS products were quite capable but to purchase 7 chassis would be somewhat costly and require more technical involvement in the configuration and support than desired.

Ciena offered mostly the same level of functionality desired but with the requirement for a onsite hot spare the price was still of concern.  A few years earlier when the current xWDM solution was installed the second vendor in the running was Ciena so their product line was known.

After a period of research into other OTN companies a vendor named Packetlight, available through RAD, was selected after technical evaluations and discussions with the firm and customers. It helped that some customers were in the same type of regulated business as well.  Initially a very functional model - the PL1000-E was considered.  It offered a handful of 10Gb ethernet and 8Gb fiber channel ports along with 1,2,4 Gb fiber as well as 1Gb/100M ethernet.

With three sites and our growth the slightly larger PL1000-TE model with the ability to be configured initially with 4 10/16Gb and 4 10Gb ethernet or fiber channel ports and can even support down to OC-12/600Mb ethernet along with an expansion module to give wavelength add / drop capabilities as well was selected.  I think it can expand to 80+ wavelengths if that were ever needed and it also offers AES data encryption.

In a meeting Packetlight demonstrated the smaller PL1000-E;  I believe the other server, storage and network engineers left that meeting with sufficient training to manage the product with minimal additional support; pick an unused port, plug in an optic, use the gui to tell the system what speed/type and away you go ... 30 seconds max you have a new wavelength doing whatever you wanted.  The distances between sites would not exceed the estimated 40 kilometer limit for 16G FC so if the storage hardware selected needs 16G the PL1000-TE can transport it.