How to add 40/100Gbps services to a existing metro network without affecting legacy installation?

[Jerry Renwick]

The existing 10GbE network is adequate for my data center now, but the 40Gbps and 100Gbps applications have been on the market for some time. So for future proofing, how to add 40Gbps and 100Gbps services to a existing metro network without affecting the legacy installation? I really need some suggestions, thank you for your kind help.

 

[bds1904]

We are going to need some additional info here. "Metro Network's" usually consist of multiple buildings connected via privately own fiber or fiber rented from a provider that is then dedicated to the Metro-E network in question. Another complication of a rented Metro-E circuit is the use of multiple wavelengths on a single fiber. If the network is completely privately owned, do you have unused fiber between buildings? If not, I'm not sure there are any CWDM or DWDM solutions out there for 40Gb or 100Gb. You may be able to use "standard" wavelengths for the 40Gb and use CWDM optics and a MUX for the 10Gb.

 

[Blinky 42]

If you don't have direct access to the dark fiber that is run end to end for your buildings, you will need to work with the providers of the fiber to potentially upgrade the equipment mid-span. Ex: if it is several buildings in a single office park and they ran 24 strand SMF between buildings that the park owns and you are just using a pair of strands now then you can get a DWDM mux and drive the fiber direct with something like
100G DWDM Muxponder and Transponder Solutions from PacketLight starting with one of the 10G -> 100G muxes and just move your current 10G ports to the mux and add on as you go. You should evaluate if it is cheaper to rent more strands vs. the mux in that situation however.

If you are not just trunking multiple 10G links together to save strands then you will probably have routers/switches at each facility and should look into what their 40G/100g capabilities are. Adding a blade to your existing chassis switch on each end and then moving the fiber from a 10G port to 40G may be the lowest impact to the infrastructure with a few min of downtime while moving the fiber.

If you don't have hardware that can support 40G today then decisions if you want to stay with the same vendor vs branching out and a migration plan to upgrade the core to 40G or higher is probably first on the list.

If this is a 2-3y down the road future planning, then I would focus on your core switches at each side and how to get them up to 100G and check with your fiber provider to see what their plans are to upgrade and offer higher speed links.

 

[maze]

+1 on what @Blinky 42 sayd..

Here and now? - check what options you have with your current gear. Unless you have pretty recent gear, the backplane quite likely wont be able to hold higher speeds than 10G.
My personal experience is mainly with cisco gear, but they are moving towards the higher speeds quite a lot lately. 40/100G will be quite common soonish. Hell, you can get a 100g port at AMS-IX (and im sure a lot of other IX's aswell) for not too bad a price considering what 10g was a few years ago.

If your looking for a plan for the next years.. yeah, look at your entire setup, where do you need 100g, where do you need 40g, and, will you need more than those speeds in 2-3-4-5 years? - Content just keeps going up and up in size and bandwidth requirements.

I gotta go install new switches next week at a customer site, they just figured out that they wanna deploy ~150 new ip-cams in a location within the next 3 weeks.. means i gotta handle another ~1.4Gbit of constant throughput in my gear back to the office .. in one week. So new optics, new switches.. I know its not much.. but you get the picture -- Bandwidth demands are skyrocketing.. and it wont slow down. So you might aswell think ahead

Best of luck, and keep us posted

 

[Evan]

ADVA make 100/40 DWDM options... But oh the cost !

When you say along side existing, it's really not very easy to manage without a complete parallel set of switches etc or does your current switches support 100 or 40.
I know a lot support 40 but it probably end up just throwing a few 10G together (assuming you have the Fiber and ports) until the next generation 100g equipment is more standard.

Looks like there is now XR from Cisco at 40G and LR is 10km in the 40G range, I had to think what the optics cost if your using straight fibre. Using DWDM and SR may not look so bad price wise in the Long term for multiple product cycles.

 

[Jerry Renwick]

Thank you for your guy's help, it's very helpful! In fact, I am recommended to plug 40G or 100G fiber optic transceiver into the terminal equipment (Ethernet switch, router etc.) , then use the patch cable to connect it to your existing DWDM network via a 1310nm band pass port on the DWDM multiplexer. But I am not sure if this will work out or not.