Fujitsu Combines SONET, Ethernet, ROADM in Packet Optical Networking Platform

To aid service providers’ shifts to packet-based networks, Fujitsu Network Communications announced its Packet Optical Networking Platform, which the company engineered from the ground up to integrate Ethernet, ROADM and SONET transport technologies on a single optical networking element.

Fujitsu’s new FLASHWAVE 9500 platform is part of an emerging class of optical gear that Infonetics Research has identified as packet optical transport platforms. Michael Howard, Infonetics’ principal analyst, said packet optical transport platforms combine the functionality of SONET/SDH, Ethernet and WDM (ROADM in particular). “Packet optical transport is the beginnings of that move to displace and replace SONET/SDH,” Howard said, describing a migration that should continue for another 15 years. “Since it’s going to take such a long period of time, you need the transition platforms that have Ethernet and SONET/SDH and WDM/ROADM.”

Fujitsu is not the first optical networking manufacturer to pursue this path. SONET/SDH vendors and WDM vendors alike are evolving their gear in similar directions. But Howard said the FLASHWAVE 9500 more than most others represents a modern architecture, designed from “today’s point of view.”

“What this is is not a combination of packet box and an optical box,” explained Sam Lisle, Fujitsu’s market development manager. “It’s really an optical networking box that is optimized for this packet-centric environment. We take everything from this optical networking heritage and apply it to the problem du jour.”

Today’s network challenge, Lisle said, is the stress of high bandwidth, high-quality, multimedia packet-based services, like high-definition TV or enterprise collaboration. The FLASHWAVE 9500, he added, allows operators to respond with “manageable scalability.”

To do this, Fujitsu’s Packet ONP integrates three key transport technologies as mentioned. The first, ROADM, “delivers highly cost-effective bulk transport and the benefit of operational streamlining as well,” Lisle said. “The second technology is Ethernet transport and connection-oriented Ethernet that provides the stringent quality of service and 50ms reliability. The third technology we are including is SONET and TDM bandwidth management. There’s a lot of multiprotocol service in the network. There are a lot of services like Ethernet that are being provisioned over SONET.

“Since we thought about this from day one for Ethernet, ROADM or SONET, we designed the system so any slot can support any type of card,” said Lisle. Along with the 9500, Fujitsu is releasing a number of new Ethernet cards, including a 20-port gigE card, a two-port 10gigE card, a two-port 10gigE card with full band tunable optics, that can be plugged into the either the FLASHWAVE 7500 or the 9500 ROADMs. On the SONET side, it offers a two-port OC192 unit and a single-port OC192 unit, which also can be can go directly into the 7500 or 9500 ROADMs. Finally, there is an eight-port multirate, multiservice card, supporting OC3, OC12, OC48 or gigabit Ethernet on any port.

Significantly, the FLASHWAVE 9500 includes a patent-pending universal switch fabric that allows both SONET-based traffic and packet-based traffic to be switched, groomed and managed in its native format without any form of circuit-emulation technology.

“And, it knows which way to switch the traffic regardless of how it comes in,” explained Lisle. “Other approaches have been taking all your TDM bandwidth and chopping it into packet and switching them as packets and reassembling them as circuits on the outbound. We are not doing anything funny like that. All the traffic is switched in its native format.”

This means that all 480 gigabits of capacity can be SONET or packet, or any ratio of each in between in 20 gigabit increments, allowing for a modular system. Because we have been able to put all this in an ASIC, it’s a low-cost fabric,” Lisle added, and explained that it allows carriers to only use SONET and pay a SONET-like price and only use Ethernet for an Ethernet price. And because the ROADM is optional, “there is no cost penalty if you choose not to equip it with the ROADM,” he said.

Fujitsu also claims the 9500 is the industry’s densest universal transport platform, supporting 480 gigabits in a third of a rack.

The FLASHWAVE 9500 system will support pseudowire and MPLS technologies to deliver connection-oriented Ethernet, and provide private-line equivalent QoS in a Ethernet services network that combines switched Ethernet and Ethernet over SONET services.

The FLASHWAVE 9500 platform is supported by the existing Fujitsu suite of management tools, including the NETSMART 500 craft user interface, NETSMART 1500 Element Management System (EMS) and the NETSMART 2000 planning tool.

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. http://us.fujitsu.com/telecom

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