Ciena counts storage over optical wins

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Oct 31, 2003

Ciena announced several new customers and key channel partners through its Ottawa-based Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG), the company's gateway to enterprise and reseller markets. Ciena's ESG is focused on delivering cost-effective network solutions to help enterprises gain business efficiencies for their existing networks and emerging applications. Ciena's current ESG offerings include high-performance storage extension solutions: the CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform (formerly Akara Corporation's OUSP platform) and ONLINE platforms, which enable enterprises to extend data between geographically dispersed data centers to meet business continuance and disaster recovery goals.

To its growing list of enterprise customers, Ciena added UC-Davis Medical Center, IMO, Toronto Hydro Telecom, Nielsen Media Research and Florida Power & Light Company. In addition to selling directly to larger enterprise users, Ciena's ESG is responsible for fostering enterprise and channel partnerships and has recently added to the company's enterprise reseller channels SBC, Interactive Services Inc. (ISI), Marketex, and Unisys.

The CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform directly multiplexes data center protocols--including Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet--into flexible SONET payloads to extend enterprises' business continuance applications over existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM networks to deliver reliable and secure storage extension. The platform is an enterprise-ready, customer premise device with DS3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48 and SDH network connectivity, enabling enterprises to easily connect their data center equipment to carriers' ubiquitous SONET/ SDH services for high-performance, cost-effective extended storage networking. The CN 2000 is seamlessly integrated into business continuance solutions with proven interoperability and qualification from leading storage vendors including EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Brocade and McDATA.