Vtesse News
Vtesse Networks announce national “Vtesse Virtual Dark Fibre” service22nd May 2008 Hertford, UK.
Vtesse greatly simplify deployment of long distance optical network services
Vtesse Networks today announced the availability of its new national “Vtesse Virtual Dark Fibre” service at IDC’s annual Enterprise Datacentre Conference in London.
The new service provides a cost effective alternative to dedicated long distance dark fibre pairs between geographically dispersed data centres and significantly reduces the complexity of planning and implementing Gigabit and Terabit level regional and national connectivity for business critical business applications.
Designed to appeal to large enterprises and government agencies as a means of providing the multi gigabit levels of bandwidth needed to replicate storage and synchronise processing between data centres, the new Vtesse service provides a foundation for the latest 10 and 40 Gigabit transmission technologies as well as emerging 100 Gigabit systems.
The service is based on Vtesse’s own national fibre network, now one of the largest in the UK. Using purely optical technologies, the service can be presented at customer premises throughout the UK. It allows users to directly interface their own electronic networking equipment to the service and it is capable of supporting any protocol at any level of bandwidth. For example, an Enterprise customer might use the service between datacentres to provide multiple channels of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel. A systems integrator might use the service to augment their own private networks to provide backbone 40 Gigabit services between Gloucester, Plymouth and Rugby.
Last mile connectivity is provided using dedicated dark fibre pairs using network routes designed to support the service levels required by each customer.To the customer’s equipment, the long distance Vtesse Virtual Dark Fibre service behaves like a medium distance pair of dark fibres.
The benefits are fivefold:
Firstly, the deployment of long distance private optical networking services is now greatly simplified as the majority of the routes have been pre-built, offsetting the time taken to build dedicated services and thus reduces time taken to deploy new services.
Secondly, by using specialist optical technologies, Vtesse are able to virtually “slice” the fibres it operates on these long distance routes into individual dedicated “channels”, allowing each fibre pair to carry many individual customers services, each offering similar capability to a pair of dark fibres. This reduces cost compared to a dedicated pair of fibres.
Thirdly, as Vtesse optically amplifies the signals approximately every 80Km in its own premises along each route, the customer is spared the (high) cost of providing and maintaining their own amplifiers as well as the cost of the premises required to locate them. Fourthly, the customer only has to bear an equitable share of the government rates levied on dedicated pairs of optical fibres along the route – which can be a significant burden over long distances (see notes).
Lastly, the topography of the Vtesse national fibre network allows for complete route diversity to all locations, enabling the five nines availability demanded by many enterprise customers.
Aidan Paul, Chief Executive of Vtesse comments “Our new virtual dark fibre service can seriously reduce the cost and complexity of planning and deploying long distance, high bandwidth connectivity. It can also improve service provisioning time. The Vtesse Virtual Dark Fibre service may well enable projects that have historically been shelved on budgetary grounds to resurface once again.”
The new service has been deployed in a high availability diversely connected configuration supporting multiple gigabit Ethernet, SDH, Fibre Channel and Ficon wavelengths for tape backup and both synchronous and asynchronous storage replication as well as for inter processor synchronisation at a leading UK retail bank.
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Note to editors:
The Vtesse service is based upon passive optical components which greatly improves service reliability. It differs from typical Gigabit services offered by network operators on long distance routes, which are normally based upon multiplexed optical wavelengths, in that the Vtesse service offers unconstrained optical capacity between customer premises. The Vtesse service can offer a lower total cost of ownership than a pair of dark fibres on route distances of 50Km or more. The longer the route distance, the more pronounced the savings will be. Vtesse Virtual Dark Fibre does not bear comparison with the limited bandwidth services offered by a managed wavelength providers.
Note on dark fibre rateable values: Business rates are payable on each pair of lit fibres in the ground. A budgetary average of £250 per route kilometre per annum is prudent.