Lucent Pushes Optical Networking
Envelope
(10/08/99, 7:53 a.m. ET)
By Loring Wirbel, EE Times
MURRAY HILL, N.J. - Lucent Technologies Inc.
will demonstrate at next week's Telecom '99
show in Geneva how far down the network it
can take packet-over-optical hardware.
The company's optical networking group will show off
PCI server cards that directly implement optical Internet
Protocol (IP) networking at 2.5-Gbit/second OC-48
Sonet rates.
Server interfaces for high-speed optical links are not
new in the enterprise, but they usually are based on
Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces.
Lucent plans to show the OptiStar GE1000 for Gigabit
Ethernet and the OptiStar FC1000R for Fibre Channel
in Geneva. But the radical addition to the company's
server adapter line is the OptiStar OC48 and OptiStar
OC12 cards, implementing 2.5-Gbit and 622-Mbit
interfaces, respectively.
Tim Sullivan, vice president and general manager of
Lucent's optical area networks group, said that by using
the TDAT "Detroit" chip from Lucent Microelectronics,
his group could offer an adapter that handled three
different optical protocols - packet over Sonet, packet
over wavelength, and SimpleData Link.
Because the adapters are intended for use across
WAN dimensions (usually metro topologies), they
interface with single-mode fibers. But the cards rely on
1,310-nm Fabry-Perot lasers to keep costs down.
Lucent fully intends the network servers to be linked
directly to add-drop multiplexers, Dense Wave Division
Multiplexing (DWDM) transponders, and Sonet rings,
allowing packets to be moved to backbones without an
optoelectronic conversion.
Sullivan said that Lucent deliberately is launching the
hardware with special software suites, such as the
OptiStar Replicator for replicating server data in a
real-time backup, and OptiStar MediaServe for voice
and video media streaming, under the assumption that
carriers and managers of large enterprises will be able
to create entirely new classes of server operations.
Web hosting server farms or storage area networks, for
example, could have individual elements separated by
long-haul WAN distances, and still be viewed by the
network as a single logical entity.
Enabling this vision on a system level will be a special
switch Lucent will debut in early 2000, dubbed
OptiStar Edge Switch, which links multiple servers
across optical backbones, using dedicated IP switching
connections at speeds up to 10 Gbits/s.
Adapter cards originally will be offered for Intel-based
Windows NT servers, though Lucent plans to expand
into Windows 2000, Linux, and some Unix operating
environments in coming months.
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