nanog mailing list archives

Re: Are there inexpensive DWDM products?


From: LF OD <bz_siege_01 () hotmail com>
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2017 19:59:03 +0000

Wow... a lot of suggestions and very quickly too. CWDM may not be an option because some of the spans are just out of 
range, but I'm going to look at it for the short spans.


Thanks for all the feedback, folks. (I'll contact some of you off-board)


LFOD


________________________________
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces () nanog org> on behalf of LF OD <bz_siege_01 () hotmail com>
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2017 11:01 AM
To: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Are there inexpensive DWDM products?

We have several buildings and a couple data centers spread around the city and interconnected via dark fiber. It's a 
very simple setup - no ROADM, no real ring, no extended layer-2 or layer-3 via the optical gear.


Pretty much we just mux/demux a channel for each building so that each building sees the two data centers directly even 
though the fiber span may wind through a couple buildings along the way. In some cases, the distance is short enough to 
use colored optics in the network gear, but mostly the distances are just long enough to warrant transponder cards.


All that being said, a lot of the gear is approaching end of life (support in some cases). I'm not an optical guru but 
I can muddle my way through with Cisco ONS and I'm aware that Ciena and Fujitsu also have similar products. We really 
don't have budget for a large optical refresh effort. However, we've saved some money here and there in the 
routing/switching arena by leveraging Arista and even Cumulus. I'm wondering if there are smaller players in the 
optical arena that have a good quality/price value?


Again, we don't need sophisticated features... we primarily have 2-to-4 1Gb and 10Gb ports required per site, then we 
mux those onto a wavelength and extend it to the two data centers. Most buildings are set up the same way, each on a 
different wavelength so the don't even see each other... only the data centers.


If you guys know of any optical gear that you can vouch for (and which costs less than a small house), we would greatly 
appreciate it. Thanks


LFOD


Current thread: