Anyone here worked with Ciena DWDM hardware before

[azev]

We have a need to run multiple wavelength over dark fiber for a few of our facility.
We engaged multiple optical vendors for this project, but although our network shop is highly skilled, none had ever worked with any optical transport gear such as cisco ons or adva or cienna. At this time we are leaning towards ciena compared to the other vendors, and would like to see if anyone here have personally worked on ciena gear.
Ciena claimed that their hardware is very easy to work with, there's GUI, industry standard CLI, etc.
Has someone here have experienced working with dwdm gear?, how difficult is it for an expert level network engineer to learn this stuff ??

 

[aero]

Worked with Adva, ciena, tellabs. Ciena is good. Should be fairly simple for any expert engineer to pick up.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

We have a need to run multiple wavelength over dark fiber for a few of our facility.

Ciena claimed that their hardware is very easy to work with, there's GUI, industry standard CLI, etc.
Has someone here have experienced working with dwdm gear?, how difficult is it for an expert level network engineer to learn this stuff ??

What exactly are you looking for - a complete transport system, or just the optical DWDM equipment?

A complete system would be something like shelves with transponders, so every signal you put into / get out of the system will be a vanilla SR/LR signal.

Just the DWDM would be only the passive optical part, and you use either DWDM SFP / SFP+ modules in your devices* or have external managed / unmanaged converters.

* Some brands only accept pluggable modules with special "magic footprints" - Cisco is one of those - if the brand / device you're dealing with doesn't recognize DWDM modules even if they have the right "magic footprints", you need to either purchase modules that intentionally mis-report what they are, or use an outboard converter. Many of the 3rd-party suppliers offer reprogrammable module identification to get around this limitation. I happen to use Solid Optics modules, but other brands "should" work. I put "should' in quotes because the further you get from the mainstream, the less experience some companies have. By the time you get to 10GbE DWDM optics, even some well-known suppliers are not capable of delivering working parts, even after multiple attempts.

This is a pair of Fiberstore 40-channel low-loss DWDM units (optical, passive), connected by attenuators equal to a 60km distance between them, connected to Cisco 4500X-16SFP+ 10GbE switches on 3 of the 40 available channels. This was the test setup before deploying everything, and it installed with no problems and has been working fine, even though the dark fiber supplier changed the route on us and made it longer.

 

[azev]

We are in fact looking to deploy a full transport system with optical switching, oadm and roadm capability.
I am familiar with passive optical dwdm & cwdm mux from my past life, but never worked on a full optical transport network gear.
Like you mentioned, my previous deployment was a passive mux with a external bank of media converters.
It was very simple point to point deployment back then, while the one I am looking to deploy now are a ring with multiple nodes with possibility of more node in the future.
Too bad company like Ciena does not publish their technical docs or configuration sample as I am curious how to set them up.
The quote I got from Ciena uses tunable optics which can be configured to whatever dwdm wavelength/channel as well as the transmit power.
My number one concern is support, although I am familiar with optical transport through switches/routers (using dom), even using otdr, I never even seen ciena gui or cli.