In the beginning...

Hello Everyone!

We decided to start this blog about the transformation Fiber Optic connectivity is undergoing these days in the datacenter space, as well as in carriers’ networks. I won’t deny we think a blog on this topic is an effective marketing tool for the products we make at FiberZone Networks, but for the most part, we want to share with you some of the insights we get going through this transformation, hoping to learn even more through your feedback and participation.

We begin this first post, as many do these days, with the “transition to the cloud”. When it comes to fiber connectivity, this transition means that more changes to network capacity and connectivity take place at the core “cloudy” part of the network, on high-bandwidth links, and for mission-critical applications. This in turn means that uninterrupted changes to fiber connectivity mean a great deal more than they used to. The Ponemon Institute analyzed the cost of outages in datacenters in a recent study, and showed that the cost of a single outage is measured in thousands-of-dollars-per-minute, and the average time to recover from outage is about 2.5 hours in fully staffed datacenters.

Consider now that a “private cloud” hosted environment, like the one shown in the picture below, means that an enterprise IT department no longer has staff onsite to manage and troubleshoot its IT infrastructure, and there you have it – IT infrastructure that has to support traffic more valuable than ever, and deployed in an environment that requires a new approach to management and control.

The Uptime Institute, a think-tank and professional services organization providing datacenter tier certification, will be holding its annual symposium in Santa Clara, CA on May 14-17. The symposium is focused on addressing these issues exactly – the operational aspects of maintaining high-availability and reducing downtimes to enterprise and hosting providers’ datacenters. We welcome you to stop by at the Innovation Pavilion and get a demonstration of our Automated Fiber Management solutions.

Remote management solutions for power and cooling in datacenters have been introduced over the  past several years, and have become mainstream, but the third leg of datacenters’ infrastructure – IT fiber connectivity, has not been effectively automated, yet! More enterprise and service provider customers realize that manual operation of fiber infrastructure can’t scale to meet their growing needs. An extreme, but real-life, example of how manual fiber connectivity looked like at one of our customers’ sites before implementing automated fiber management is shown in the picture below.

Back in January we announced a strategic relationship with 3M to bring a new approach to manage fiber connectivity to the datacenter market. As a small company, we’re extremely excited about this relationship with 3M – it means that our technology is now becoming available to more customers around the world, and offered by one of the world’s most reputable companies. For those of you located in Europe, we’ll be having a joint webinar on May-15^th, describing the joint offering. Please register to learn more.

We’re also seeing tide shifts in Asia, where unlike in the case of the early movers in the U.S., deployments of FTTx networks are also used to serve Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs) and enterprise customers. These customers require strict high-availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and service providers build their fiber-optic networks accordingly. China Telecom, for example, is deploying intelligent fiber connectivity for its FTTx deployment with 20 million homes passed planned by 2013, quoting that “manual operations [of fiber] incur high deployment costs and great operations and maintenance pressure for operators”. We’ve also seen some of the major MSOs in the U.S. make plans to use EPON architecture to deliver Ethernet services to SMBs, so we may see a similar trend in the U.S. shortly. We hope to tell you more about developments in transforming fiber connectivity in this market soon.

We’d like to hear your views and opinions, and I promise you’ll hear more from us soon!