Alcatel, BT Ignite, HP, and Brocade achieve City-to-city SAN interconnection over 300 km in Spain

Alcatel, BT Ignite (BT), Hewlett Packard (HP), and Brocade today announced the successful completion of what they claim is the industry's longest transmission of native Storage Area Network (SAN) services over integrated DWDM/SDH networks. Deploying Alcatel's advanced metro DWDM and SDH systems, Brocade SAN infrastructure, and HP StorageWorks storage systems, BT carried synchronous storage data replication services live over a distance of 300 km from Madrid to Albacete in Spain.

With this transmission world record, business users such as large corporations will now be able to synchronously replicate stored data in locations up to 300 km away. Before this test, native SAN data could be replicated in a synchronous way over a distance of only about 100 km depending on the network topology. This announcement gives corporations more options when looking to protect their data by extending the reach of their storage data management, say representatives from participating companies.

Additionally, telecommunication network operators can leverage the investments already made in network infrastructure to offer a wider range of storage services. This lets them optimize their critical capital expenditure investments and shorten their infrastructure return on investment.

"As the need for data storage has grown, we had to create new application models to help our customers secure their data anywhere," explains Catherine Hawley, senior vice president, Applications Management and Hosting, BT Ignite. "This performance, relying on multi-vendor technology and expertise, gives us the first mover advantage of reliably extending SAN services beyond metropolitan and regional boundaries thanks to the capacity and reliability of the transmission network deployed by BT in Spain."

"Native" means that the SAN traffic is transported transparently across the distance and without changing the signal itself.