Looking to offer customers the ability to build cost-effective and easily provisioned serverless offices and virtual data centers across metropolitan distances, optical infrastructure heavyweight Metromedia Fiber Network Inc. (MFN) Wednesday got even tighter with Cisco Systems Inc.
MFN inked an agreement to include Cisco’s Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment in its WaveChannel9 Optical Network solution, starting with the Cisco Metro 1500 series.
The Cisco Metro 155 is a protocol-independent DWDM solution that supports 32 wavelengths per fiber pair.
Under the newly expanded relationship, MFN will offer its WaveChannel customers a choice in technology for their dedicated fiber-optic and DWDM networks. The combination of the WaveChannel service and the DWDM technology will allow enterprise customers to expand the distance and application capabilities of existing local and metropolitan area networks, and storage networks, while addressing the need to move large amounts of data, voice and video quickly, transparently and inexpensively.
“MFN continues to drive intelligence to the network’s edge, making the optical Internet a reality,” said Nick Tanzi, president and chief operating officer of MFN. “By integrating DWDM technology from Cisco with our fiber-optic infrastructure, we can deliver end-to-end optical networking capabilities that are ideally suited to meet the needs of today’s fast-growing data-centric corporations.”
WaveChannel expands the ability of MFN’s dark fiber customers to deploy advanced applications like storage area networks, data mirroring, disaster recovery, data warehousing and sophisticated high-resolution networks. Enterprises using WaveChannel can send data via protocols such as IP, Gigabit Ethernet, ESCON, HDTV, Fibre Channel, SONET and ATM directly and simultaneously over the same dark fiber network. WaveChannel is fully managed and sold by the wavelength, eliminating up-front capital expenditures and ongoing maintenance costs.
“The relationship between Cisco and MFN offers access to a well-managed DWDM infrastructure that can integrate existing solutions for today’s needs and grow for future data, storage, video and voice networking needs,” said Carl Engineer, director of Marketing for the Metropolitan Services Business Unit at Cisco. “Given DWDM’s ability to efficiently harness the high capacity that optical networking provides, our mutual customers will enjoy a new level of flexibility and cost savings in their networks.”
