ADVA Optical Networking's FSP 2000 deployed at Catholic Health System and Weill Medical College

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Sept 16, 2005

ADVA Optical Networking of Mahwah, New Jersey, announced that Catholic Health System (CHS) in Buffalo, New York, has deployed ADVA's Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 2000 optical networking solution to support bandwidth-intensive Ethernet and storage applications. ADVA's hybrid Coarse/Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM/DWDM) system provides secure, redundant backbone transport for a private fiber-optic network interconnecting Catholic Health System's 40 geographically dispersed facilities and can easily, affordably accommodate emerging bandwidth needs.

Catholic Health System teamed with Fibertech Networks to develop a 70-mile optical network over three years. ADVA's FSP 2000 platforms are deployed at three of the health system's sites--two data centers and one hospital--along the new network, which became fully operational in July.

"ADVA offers the most advanced CWDM/DWDM hybrid solution we found on the market," explained Doug Torre, director of networking and technology services for CHS. "In addition to the business case and value of the FSP 2000, what set ADVA apart was its demonstrated understanding of the healthcare market."

The ADVA FSP 2000 provides reliable, secure transport for more than 100 different services for CHS--from standard, office applications such as patient billing and accounting to advanced, clinical services such as Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), which allows caregivers to digitally store, manipulate, and share cardiology and radiology images. CHS plans to soon implement storage services based on the Fibre Channel protocol, ensuring continuity of care in the event of network failure at any of its hospitals, primary care centers, diagnostic and treatment centers, or other facilities.

"We sought a solution that would both prove affordable today and allow us to gradually add services without the expense of expanding the fiber infrastructure later," added Chuck Simet, network engineer with Catholic Health System. "ADVA provided a hybrid solution that could migrate without traffic interruption and allowed us to do upgrades without taking the system down."

Brian P. McCann, chief marketing and strategy officer with ADVA Optical Networking, said, "Catholic Health System is a great example of a busy and successful healthcare organization with demanding 24X7 performance and reliability needs. The advent of hybrid CWDM/DWDM networking is encouraging more enterprises than ever before to implement high-performance Ethernet and storage services. This is one of the most technologically advanced health information networks of its kind in the region. ADVA looks forward to continued partnership with CHS to cost-effectively deploy networking capabilities that provide maximum capacity into the future."

ADVA Optical Networking also announced that Weill Medical College of Cornell University has deployed ADVA's Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 2000 optical networking solution to support Gigabit Ethernet voice and data applications and Fibre Channel storage services. ADVA's Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) system provides secure, redundant links between Weill Medical College's main campus and off-site data center, high-speed connectivity to the Internet and Internet2 through the NYSERNet New York City Dark Fiber Network, and ample, affordable scalability for emerging bandwidth needs.

Having outgrown its data center on Cornell University's main campus on the upper eastside of New York City and needing a disaster recovery site, Weill Medical College opened an off-site facility in midtown in 2003. At about the same time, Weill Medical College connected to the statewide optical network, NYSERNet New York City Dark Fiber Network, designed to provide nearly unlimited capacity at a fixed price for research and education institutions. ADVA FSP 2000 platforms are deployed at each of the three sites along Weill Medical College's 25-kilometer backbone ring network: the off-site data center, the main campus, and a NYSERNet co-location facility.

"ADVA's solution met our financial and operational needs for reliable, high-speed performance at cost-effective rates," said Dr. Steven Erde, senior director of the Office of Academic Computing at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. "We initially looked at T3 connections and saw they weren't going to cut it and then the big question became CWDM versus DWDM (Dense WDM). In most cases, DWDM delivers more scalability than CWDM, but DWDM provided more bandwidth and channels than we needed. With the ADVA system, we are getting the same degree of redundancy and fault tolerance with CWDM as is possible with DWDM but at a lower price point."

In either flavor of WDM, applications of any recognized protocol are multiplexed across a single fiber pair. Application performance is native-speed and the fiber infrastructure is cost-effectively shared. The primary difference between CWDM and DWDM is the number of application channels supported. CWDM uses wider spacings between wavelengths (20 nanometers to DWDM's 1.6 nanometers or smaller), so fewer channels are created in CWDM (typically eight to DWDM's 64). Because they require lower-cost components, CWDM systems tend to cost 30 to 50 percent less than DWDM systems of the same channel count and system functionality.