Verizon’s Tarazi links cloud, 100G benefits

The massive earthquakes that rocked Japan this March had little to no impact on Verizon’s global customers as investments in submarine fiber and more dynamic and re-routable optical networks weathered the storm.

Speaking at an analyst day event at Ciena – one of the key vendors in its 100G optical network roll-out worldwide—Ihab Tarazi, Verizon’s vice president of global planning said the Verizon global network was able to withstand the earthquakes and subsequent after-shocks and tsunamis.

“The network survived all of that within 50 milliseconds; we didn’t lose service to a single customer,” he said, noting that the Verizon network now sports 8-way diversity in its cross-ocean fiber runs. He credited Verizon’s investment in redundant submarine fiber as well as the optical network’s “dynamic mesh [architecture’s] ability to see all these paths and restore dynamically within milliseconds. When you’ve built a network with the physical capability, with all the submarine cable investment with fiber across the globe, as well as the control plane, you can really achieve six-nines of availability on a sustainable basis.”

With customers placing more and more of their applications in large global data centers, their network requirements are changing as well, Tarazi said. “The new fundamental customer expectation is that events like that are seen as a small latency fluctuation, not an outage,” he said. “That’s the new expectation in the marketplace. That’s what people need for their applications.”

Verizon has been aggressive in deploying 100G capabilities (CP: Verizon to deploy 100 G Ethernet on European link; Briefing Room: Verizon First to Deploy Standards-Based 100G Ethernet on Long-Haul IP Backbone Network). That extra bandwidth comes just in time as customers, not to mention Verizon itself, make major moves into the cloud (CP: Verizon makes big cloud data center bet) and (CP: Verizon bolsters everything-as-a-service cloud strategy with Terremark acquisition).

“Network demands are changing,” said Tarazi. “Now you have all these major data centers that have applications and services inside where all these onramps need to get into these data centers.”

Ciena moves optical platform forward

To target such opportunities, Ciena earlier this week introduced new capabilities to its optical switching line, including adding OTN switching to its 6500 Series and 5410 Reconfigurable Switching System, as well as adding a 2-slot version of its 6500 Series for network edge applications. In other platform news, it added optical control plane capabilities to the 6500 as well as coherent optical processing capabilities to the 5400. Finally, it debuted a new platform-wide management system dubbed OneControl to let operators view and manage wavelength, OTN and packet services from the core out to the network edge.

“The key thing here is making the control plane and OTN switching available across a wide variety of platforms, enabling carriers to differentiate their service offerings,” said Rick Dodd, senior vice president of global marketing for Ciena, in an interview. “The volume of 10G services [carriers are delivering] is very high. There’s so many they need to carry them over 100G wavelengths. That’s driving the demand for OTN switching and grooming.”

For incumbent service providers like Verizon, they face face a world where bandwidth demands can be very unpredictable, from bursty data service demands to fluctuating mobile data usage that needs to get aggregated back into the IP core. “There’s an interest in taking a more reconfigurable and dynamic approach and turn it into an advantage when delivering services,” Dodd said.