WHITE PAPER
This guide is designed for IT managers and business executives who are assessing the capabilities of their current metropolitan-area and wide-area networking (MAN/WAN) infrastructures to meet their business continuance demands as well as to support powerful new applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), videoconferencing, and video on demand (VOD). These managers and executives recognize that their current MAN/WAN strategy using leased lines, ATM, or Frame Relay is failing to resolve growing challenges, including concerns for resiliency and the ability to support latency-sensitive applications such as voice, video, and storage. And they are concerned about the growing complexity of managing their networks as the number of individual leased lines or ATM or Frame Relay circuits continuously expands, driving up network complexity and telecommunications costs.
This white paper will define the concept of a Enterprise Architecture optical network, a multiservice optical network that is designed to be highly available and resilient and that has the performance and intelligence to help optimize business operations by reducing complexity and improving operational efficiencies. The guide will look at common networking architectures being used today and the resulting limitations of these approaches in light of the new challenges. Finally, the paper will describe the components of a Cisco Systems® Enterprise Architecture optical network and how such a network responds to today's new business challenges by helping businesses to protect, optimize, and grow their businesses.
ARE YOU ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE?
Protect
Business continuity used to be of concern primarily to industries such as retail brokerages, credit card authorization services, reservation call centers, and others greatly exposed to the costs of downtime. But today, for many more industries, network downtime is no longer acceptable. With critical business applications operating over the network, downtime can result in enormous losses in productivity, customer loyalty, and revenue. With these concerns in mind, IT managers are striving to put in place the needed disaster recovery and business continuance structures. A Enterprise Architecture network must offer high availability and low latency to help ensure that critical data is readily available to employees, customers, and business partners.
Optimize
Enterprises desire to optimize business operations to increase productivity and lower costs by reducing complexity and improving operational efficiencies. New Web-enabled and collaborative applications, including IP telephony, VoD, and Web-based videoconferencing, are creating new operational efficiencies as these applications, once operating on separate networks, are now converging on unified IP infrastructures. At the same time that the move to Web-based applications is occurring, the need to support older applications remains. Phased deployments necessitate supporting both older and newer systems in parallel, allowing for a safer gradual cutover to new systems. Optimized for flexibility and efficiency, multiservice networks provide a Enterprise Architecture infrastructure to support both new as well as existing systems.
Grow
As deployment of new high-bandwidth applications expands, the demand for bandwidth grows in response. Network scalability is critical when applications are producing gigabytes of data. Scalability must be evaluated not only in gigabytes but also in timeliness. A network must grow to meet the time constraints of new applications and not be held captive by slow provisioning times. A Enterprise Architecture network must grow to meet business demands as needed.
TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT: HOW BUSINESS-READY IS YOUR NETWORK?
Today, many enterprises use one or more of three common MAN/WAN strategies: dedicated T1 or T3 circuits, more "data-centric" ATM and Frame Relay networks, or higher speed, "traditional" optical solutions to interconnect their facilities. Designed before the demanding requirements of Web-enabled, disaster recovery and business continuance applications, older networking technologies fall short on multiservice capabilities, scalability, reliability, and latency requirements. Typical MAN/WAN networking solutions today often mix and match these technologies, resulting in inefficient and costly networks that lack the ability to protect, optimize, and grow your business.
Consider the typical T1 networking infrastructure. As network throughput demands increase, the required response is to order new circuits. These may be readily available or may take a month or more to provision. To provide redundancy requires purchasing even more circuits. And because T1s are not multiservice, before long it is not uncommon to see numerous redundant low-bandwidth networks, each supporting a different service requirement: one network for voice, one or more for data, and one or more for storage (Figure 1).
The result is a patchwork of MAN/WAN and storage area network (SAN) solutions, each with a mix of diverse technologies, resulting in a complex, costly network that is difficult to manage and won't expand as the business grows.
Figure 1
Redundant Networks Lead to Inefficiencies
In addition, each of these networks has its own service agreements, and each can involve different technologies, vendors, billing arrangements, and training and optimization requirements. The complexity can be costly. Companies need a single network technology that efficiently supports all data, voice, and storage traffic to minimize complexity and support throughput requirements.
For demanding applications such as business continuance and VoIP or IP video, dedicated lines simply won't suffice. For example, many MANs/SANs are connected today using T1 or E1 lines, but neither of these offers the required 99.999 percent uptime nor the needed throughput. Of particular concern for business continuity is the inability of dedicated leased lines to support storage transport natively-instead requiring "extension" platforms. These adjunct platforms typically introduce performance constraints on the SAN. Additionally, voice and video applications require a sub-50-millisecond restoration time to help ensure uninterrupted communication, but leased lines may not offer this restoration speed.
Some enterprises have opted to deploy traditional optical solutions that offer higher availability and higher speeds than private lines, ATM, or Frame Relay. Traditional optical technology, however, lacks the critical capability to support multiple transport types, an important capability of next-generation optical platforms such as the Cisco® ONS product line. Therefore, as before, enterprises are forced to deploy multiple networks: one for voice, one for data, and one for storage. No gain is realized through network consolidation or efficiencies of scale as is found with multiservice platforms. While enterprises appreciate the speed improvement and the high-availability characteristics of optical, they still must contend with the complexity and inefficiency of multiple networks.
ENTERPIRSE ARCHITECTURE OPTICAL NETWORKING
How Cisco Multiservice Optical Networking Helps Businesses Achieve a Business-Ready Network
A Cisco Enterprise Architecture optical network takes enterprise networking to the next stage of performance and service flexibility. Also known as a multiservice optical network, it provides support for an enterprise's voice, video, data, and storage needs across one network, eliminating the need for redundant networks (Figure 2). This type of network is also often referred to as "next-generation" optical networking, reflecting the significant leap forward between it and traditional optical solutions.
Figure 2
Multiservice Optical Networks Efficiently Consolidate Voice, Data, and Storage Traffic
The Cisco Enterprise Architecture optical network does the following for proactive businesses:
• Protect-Cisco optical networking platforms provide the protection of full redundancy, increasing business resiliency, and the ability to comply with regulations. Cisco platforms offer intelligent protection schemes to guard against failures in the fiber plant, providing recovery times of less than 50 milliseconds. If a construction crew accidentally severs a buried fiber cable, traffic will switch to failover, or redundant, fiber paths within 50 milliseconds, a disruption undetectable by network applications.
• Optimize-Cisco multiservice optical networking platforms support voice, video, data, and storage on one infrastructure to optimize operations flexibly. This enables a unified, converged infrastructure and enables enterprises to eliminate the multitude of T1 or E1 leased lines that have created a complex maze of redundant, low-bandwidth networks. What's more, IT managers are free to mix various protocols across the same network infrastructure for tremendous flexibility, including voice, video, Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON), IBM Fiber Connection (FICON), Fibre Channel, and Gigabit Ethernet to support both new and existing applications.
• Grow-Cisco multiservice optical platforms offer industry-leading density and are built to scale, offering 32 protected channels operating at up to 10 Gbps for a total of 320 Gbps of capacity over a single fiber pair.
Cisco optical platforms include:
• Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP)-High-density aggregation of voice, video, and data, as well as storage protocols, over a SONET/SDH network.
• Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP)-High-density aggregation of data, storage, and SONET/SDH services, supporting up to 32 2.5- or 10-Gbps wavelengths over a DWDM network.
• Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM Multiservice Aggregation Platform-High-density aggregation of data and storage protocols over a single 2.5- or 10-Gbps wavelength, maximizing the wavelength efficiency of a dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) network.
• Cisco ONS 15540 ESPx Extended Services Platform-High-density aggregation of data and storage wavelengths supporting up to 32 2.5- or 10-Gbps wavelengths over a DWDM network.
To learn more about Cisco optical solutions, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/optical.
Managed Optical Services
As companies focus on executing their core business missions, many have limited resources for integrating new technologies. Cisco optical platforms are offered as part of managed optical services from major service providers such as SBC/AT&T Corp, Time Warner Telecom, Verizon, BellSouth, British Telecom, and Qwest, as well as from systems integrators such as IBM Global Services and HP Services. These providers offer extensive experience in fiber optics and can easily and cost-effectively deliver the benefits of optical networking through a growing portfolio of managed optical services.
For more information about managed optical networks, see: Maximizing Business Performance and Resilience with Managed Multiservice Optical Networking.
Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Storage Networking Products
For storage extension and data center interconnect, Cisco ONS optical solutions provide a highly available, high throughput infrastructure for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Storage Networking Products. The Cisco MDS product family consists of the Cisco MDS 9500 Series multilayer directors, the Cisco MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch, and the Cisco MDS 9100 Series of fixed-configuration fabric switches, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides a complete line of products to meet requirements for storage networks of all sizes and architectures. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family delivers intelligent network services such as virtual SANs, comprehensive network security, advanced traffic management, sophisticated diagnostics, and unified SAN management. In addition, the Cisco MDS 9500 Series and the Cisco MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch provide multiprotocol and multitransport integration and an open platform for embedding intelligent storage services such as network-based virtualization. With its multilayer approach to network and storage intelligence, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family ushers in a new era in storage networking.
To learn more about Cisco MDS 9000 storage solutions, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/storage.
Figure 3 illustrates the flexibility of Cisco metro DWDM solutions and integration with the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Fibre Channel switches.
Figure 3
Consolidate Data, Voice, Video, and Storage Applications on a High-Speed Network
Storage Certification
Cisco Enterprise Architecture optical networking and storage technologies provide the foundation for integrated offerings by leading data center vendors, enabling fully certified environments. These include market leaders such as EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, HDS, Microsoft, and Veritas. Cisco collaborates with industry leaders across many disciplines to facilitate smooth, integrated delivery of data center infrastructures that enterprises can tailor to their unique requirements today and easily adjust as requirements grow and change. These partnerships give data center managers the resources they need to design, deploy, and maintain agile data centers that effectively support their business goals.
To learn more about Cisco optical networking solutions for business continuance see: Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture-Optical Networking Solutions for Business Continuance. 
CISCO ENTERPRISE DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE
Cisco has introduced the Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture to help enterprises protect, optimize, and grow their businesses with an intelligent network architecture that aligns data center resources with business priorities. Based on an intelligent network foundation, it supports immediate data center demands such as consolidation, business continuance, and security while laying the foundation for emerging service-oriented, on-demand computing technologies. The foundation of the Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture is the network infrastructure, which has three components: the intelligent IP network, the intelligent storage network, and the intelligent optical network.
The intelligent optical network is designed with availability, scalability, and flexibility, helping to ensure a lasting infrastructure and protecting investments by accommodating both existing and emerging technologies. Cisco offers DWDM solutions for applications that require the transmission of high-bandwidth or high-density services over metro distances (primary-to-secondary data center interconnection, for example). Cisco also offers storage over SONET/SDH solutions for applications that require managed optical services or transmission over regional distances (interconnection to out-of-region disaster recovery sites, for example).
For more information about the Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture, visit theEnterprise Data Center Architecture Website.
To learn more about Cisco Enterprise Architecture Optical Networking Solutions, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/optical.