April 5, 2004 Phoenix--At Storage Networking World Spring 2004 held here, CIENA Corporation today announced the general availability of its newest generation CN 2000 storage over SONET/SDH platform. The CN 2000 platform now makes even more efficient use of bandwidth, lowering recurring bandwidth charges for the enterprise and making advanced data center applications more affordable with dynamic bandwidth assignment capabilities. Additionally, by employing the recently ratified International Telecommunications Union (ITU) generic framing procedure (GFP) standard that includes asynchronous GFP-T, the CN 2000 better enables service providers to deliver storage connectivity services to business customers.
"With growing concerns about ensuring rapid business recovery to comply with new regulatory mandates, IT managers face the daunting task of remotely replicating more types of critical business information than ever before," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC. "Solutions like CIENA's new generation CN 2000 will allow IT managers to extend advanced data protection capabilities, such as remote mirroring and backup, to a broader range of applications while reducing the costs associated with the wide area networks that support these services."
Dynamic bandwidth assignment allows multiple enterprise applications or data center protocols to dynamically share the same wide area network (WAN) bandwidth by consolidating traffic using priority weighting. With this new feature, the CN 2000 maintains quality of service (QoS) for each application while avoiding the performance penalties associated with IP-based solutions by physically isolating different applications, giving the data its own secure circuit across the network.
The CN 2000 also employs asynchronous GFP-T for data adaptation, improving carrier-based transport services for storage protocols, which enables service providers to efficiently deliver storage extension services to enterprise customers through existing SONET/SDH networks. CIENA led development of asynchronous GFP-T, a component of the ITU-T G.7041/Y.1303 standard, and brought to market this version of GFP on its CN 2000 more than a year prior to formal ratification. GFP enables efficient, standards-based transport of LAN and storage protocols on SONET/SDH and optical transport networks. Asynchronous GFP-T adds support for asynchronous adaptation of data protocols for sub-rate transport and extension of flow-controlled protocols on SONET/SDH transport infrastructures, while maintaining the minimum latency and strong error control features of transparent GFP. With support for asynchronous GFP-T, the CN 2000 platform improves transport bandwidth efficiency, increases scalability, and makes GFP-enabled services affordable to enterprises by supporting bandwidth matched to their applications' requirements.
Additionally, with the release of the newest generation CN 2000, CIENA increased its scalability to further reduce bandwidth requirements and to allow the platform to grow dynamically with an enterprise as needs change over time. Specifically, the latest release includes a new 8-port ESCON client module, allowing up to 16 Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), ESCON and FICON services to share a single WAN connection.
The CN 2000 storage extension platform is designed for enterprises and service providers seeking to cost-effectively extend business continuance and disaster recovery applications such as tape/disk backup, synchronous/asynchronous disk mirroring, and server geo-clustering between multiple data centers. The CN 2000 allows multiple applications to be multiplexed onto separate physical channels within the same SONET/SDH or DWDM circuit, eliminating the need for an entire circuit to be allocated for a single application, requiring only a fraction of the bandwidth. Additionally, integrated data compression on all protocols significantly reduces MAN/WAN networking costs, enabling enterprises to meet budget and business continuance goals.