In the highly competitive banking business, quick time-to-market for new services and initiatives is critical to success. And minute-to-minute operations depend on continuous network availability, even in the event of catastrophic failures or other network outages.

When a Fortune 500 company – one of the largest commercial banks in the US – serving a broad range of retail, business, and enterprise clients in more than 1,500 branch locations with nearly 3,000 ATMs – was relocating its secondary data center to a new city to meet business continuity and disaster recovery requirements, they were determined to find a networking solution that would meet its need for continuous network availability, while at the same time allow direct control of connection management and bandwidth allocation to accommodate fluctuations in network traffic.

To protect their technological investment and minimize future disruption, their new network had to be compatible with both current and anticipated applications, supporting GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) connections for existing IP-based applications and direct Fibre Channel (FC), FICON® and ESCON® for higher-performance data replication applications in the future. And the network had to be high-performance, equipped to move multi-terabits of data efficiently with latency consistently below 20 milliseconds.

Transport Options

Based on these criteria, the bank evaluated several transport options, including SONET-based services, virtual private networks (VPNs) and a private bandwidth approach. However, only one was best suited to handle the millions of financial transactions and myriad of traffic types that pass through their network each day.

They quickly ruled out VPNs. Though a VPN solution promised low operating costs, flexible provisioning, and high reliability, it precluded effective storage replication due to latency from Layer 2 or Layer 3 switching at every “hop.”

Once it became obvious that only an optical solution could meet its performance and cost requirements, the bank focused on two primary options: a SONET-based network service, the method previously used to connect the two data centers; and a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based private network solution offered by a major national carrier in partnership with a leading transport technology vendor.

The organization decided to pursue a WDM-based private bandwidth solution that could be managed directly for optimal performance, minimal cost and rapid time-to-market. The benefits were many, including:

• 10 Gb/s wavelengths guarantee low latency for storage replication, VoIP and other delay-sensitive applications. And wavelengths can be easily added for more capacity from the field thanks to the software defined add/drop multiplexer.

• Flexibility and control ensure timely support for new applications and optimal use of shared resources. The bank’s network operator can adjust application connections for efficient, cost-saving use of the shared network by setting minimum and maximum bandwidth parameters for each application connection.

• Assured operations with redundant SONET links in the data centers and diverse optical routes in the backbone. The network can recover from any outage in milliseconds.

• Operators can provision support for new applications in minutes and program individual ports for compatibility with a variety of optical interfaces. The bank can upgrade from GbE interfaces to direct FC, ESCON, or FICON when necessary, thereby protecting the bank’s investment and leveraging future standards for new applications and technologies.

The result: This private optical bandwidth solution provides the bank with exceptional performance, assured service, responsive support for new applications and complete control—at a cost one-third less per month than a SONET-based network solution.

Ray Patalano is Enterprise Marketing Manager at Ciena Corp., 978-489-2019; email: rpatalan@ciena.com;

web: www.ciena.com.