"As the availability of dark fiber grows, new OEMs are selling dark-fiber access systems to carriers that reside within the corporate environment. Newcomers like Quantum Bridge and Luxn offer special optical access equipment to carriers, often with LAN- and SAN-only interfaces like Ethernet and Fibre Channel. This lets carriers manage Fibre Channel server farms, once seen as solely the domain of enterprise data managers"
Dark Fiber is fiber optic cable that exists from point A to point B, but has no tariffed traffic over it. It is typically found in metropolitan areas, and utilized in metropolitan area networks. It is sold at a higher price than ATM, GigE, ESCON, or other tariffed protocols. The buyer can use it for whatever they want, like SONET or GigE, or weird home-grown protocols.
Optical access equipment, to me, means attachment to the dark fiber. It could be DWDM-type of equipment that allows you to run GigE, FC, and ATM over one fiber pair, to solve two or three enterprise-level problems.
I disagree that dark fiber should be LAN- or SAN-only. If you have a good DWDM interface, it should carry whatever you want at the wave-length (??? color-band?) you want.
This is a very specialized niche, that has lots of potential for end-users who have several large, enterprise-class, locations in one metropolitan area. To me, those are decreasing in number as localization decreases and bandwidth gets cheaper. It costs a lot less to build in Cleburne, TX than it does in downtown Dallas. What someone somewhere has to decide is if the cheap&huge bandwidth is gonna get to their site soon enough.
On the other hand, I absolutely love the idea of FC server farms. |
