May 5, 2009

Ciena's 100G Stimulates Finance

The financial sector may be shrinking, but advanced optics are accelerating the links between some of that industry's data centers, as today's 100 Gbps news from Ciena and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Euronext indicates.

In a project that will reach testing phase this summer and go live in 2010, Ciena is providing 50 km 100 Gbps links between two facilities in the metropolitan areas of both London and New York City.

These four advanced and high-traffic facilities are part of the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) network owned by NYSE Euronext, the holding company for more than a dozen international cash equities and derivative exchanges.

What motivated NYSE to add 100G optics to SFTI was the desire to attain "the fastest transactions times (and) very low latency," said Tom Mock, Ciena SVP of strategic planning.

The NYSE operates the SFTI network both for internal needs and for commercial customers seeking links to multiple places of liquidity.

On the Ciena side, this implementation entails "a card set upgrade onto the CN 4200 line," Mock said. "Installation and equipment is imminent."

Using both off-the-shelf and custom silicon, the upgrade builds upon a demonstration of 100G technology exhibited last November at SuperComputing 08, in which Ciena received 10, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) links from the California Institute of Technology, mapped them onto a 100G payload, and transmitted them over a single wavelength.

As discussed in this related article from CT's February issue (click here), vendors are adopting various approaches in the ongoing migration to100G. Ciena uses dual polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK) modulation and plans to increase distances to between 1,000 km and 1,500 km with the addition of coherent receivers, Mock said.

The company is engaged with the IEEE, ITU-T and OIF (Optical Internetworking Forum) and anticipates more near-term traction with niche markets, such as finance, or as a solution for discrete capacity constraints, he added.

"Late 2011, early 2012 is when we think large market deployments of 100G will happen," he said.

- Jonathan Tombes

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