Pan-African ICT group XON and ADVA deploy Africa’s first 100Gbps enterprise fibre network
Pan-African ICT group XON and ADVA Optical Networking have implemented Africa’s first 100Gbps link between three data centres at a financial institution.
The link provides the capability to perform synchronisation between the data centres as well as replication, failover and disaster recovery (DR) for one customer.
“The three DCs are 60km apart, which is not a problem for the ADVA transponder cards that have an effective range of 80 kilometres,” says Steven van der Westhuizen, sales executive in XON’s transmission division.
The links are currently transmitting 40Gbps of data and a second phase to the project will see that increased to 80Gbps. XON’s customer, in the financial services industry, did not divulge the volume of data being transmitted. It is, however, business-critical data from the organisation’s production environment, replicated between two facilities and a third, disaster recovery (DR), site.
“This is my largest customer in Africa and they are the first to indicate that they have a requirement for this enormous throughput capacity,” says Van der Westhuizen.
“ADVA Optical Networking’s solutions give us the ability to meet the demanding needs of Africa’s largest organisations when it comes to transmission. It means we can deliver long-haul, metro fibre, access network fibre-based solutions, ROADM-based DWDM solutions with full support for GMPLS services, low latency data centre connectivity, cloud computing connectivity and service demarcation for optical and Ethernet services.
“This type of fibre network delivers the type of low latency, protocol agnostic connectivity transmitting any form of data natively at the speed of light, that is critical when enabling new applications such as virtualisation, cloud computing or software-defined networking (SDN),” Van der Westhuizen adds.
ADVA Optical Networking supplies solutions to the world’s largest financial organisations, such as Secure Financial Trading Infrastructure (SFTI), owned and operated by NYSE Euronext in the US.
Of that deployment, Christoph Glingener, CTO of ADVA Optical Networking, says: “The financial industry has some of the most demanding requirements of any in the network. In this environment, customers need to know their mission-critical data is always safe, always accessible. There’s no room for error.”
The solution is a scalable wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system specifically designed for large enterprises and service providers that require a flexible, cost-effective system that will multiplex, transport and protect high-speed data, storage, voice and video applications over fibre optic networks.
Originally on IT-Online
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