Now more than ever it is critical for businesses to maintain control over their network infrastructure and its scalability, with data traffic rising due to the growing demand for bandwidth-hungry applications, and with data protection becoming a major concern.
Enterprises are increasingly electing to build their own infrastructure, leasing dark fibre and lighting it with owned optical transport equipment.
Once a DWDM foundation is established, self-built infrastructure can dramatically lower CAPEX and OPEX. This article discusses the considerations IT leaders must weigh when building their own infrastructure.
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1. Acquiring dark fibre - enterprises must determine their current and future data transport capacity needs, preparing their optical backbone infrastructure for future scalability. DWDM is the means of increasing bandwidth over existing fibre networks as it allows transmission of up to 96 wavelengths over a single dark fibre, each carrying 200G capacity of data.
2. Deciding on a colocation site - enterprises must select a colocation site / data centre that best fits the unique needs of the organisation. These can include location, rack space, power consumption and security for current and future growth.
3. Selecting the equipment that will light the fibre – this will depend on the distance (e.g. metro, short/long haul), capacity required (e.g. 100/200/400G), data protocols that need to be supported (e.g. Ethernet, Fibre Channel), and topology (e.g. point-to-point, ring), and future growth needs. In addition, the type of application needs to be considered (e.g. mission-critical, time-sensitive) – does the enterprise require encryption, redundancy, or protection.
4. Training on DWDM – some personnel training on DWDM networks may be required to install and maintain network equipment.
Read this article from PacketLight Networks which discusses in detail these and more considerations enterprises need to take into account when building their own WDM network.