Cisco ONS 15400 Series

Switch and Data Management Company, LLC, is a provider of carrier-neutral colocation and interconnection services. The Tampa-based company provides telecommunications carriers, Internet service providers, voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers, content providers, gaming companies, and enterprises with cost-effective access to customers, networks, and each other.

Switch and Data has been growing fast. The firm has acquired five companies since 1998, and its employee base has nearly doubled, to 280, in the past three years. "The pulse of our business is driven by the amount of IP packets - voice, music, and video - that flow through our exchanges," says Ernest Sampera, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Switch and Data. "That's been growing by about 30 percent annually."

To accommodate this growth, Switch and Data wanted to expand its colocation and interconnection capabilities at key data centers. But space at those facilities - especially at 111 Eighth Avenue and 60 Hudson Street in New York City - is in extremely high demand among major telecom service providers, and expanding connectivity into new suites is virtually impossible. Switch and Data had to find ways to support more business within its existing footprint.

The company's network - built with Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) appliances in a ring architecture - was nearing its limits, says Ali Marashi, chief information officer for Switch and Data. "If there was new demand in one suite that suddenly increased the level of traffic, we had to upgrade the entire ring to continue delivering service."

Switch and Data also wanted to find ways to offer customers more options for expanding and maximizing their presence within the 111 Eighth Avenue and 60 Hudson Street "carrier hotels." As companies required additional space, power, and connectivity for their services (such as disaster recovery, peering, and transit services), they were increasingly interested in interconnecting the locations.

Switch and Data's leadership team decided to upgrade the network at 111 Eighth Avenue to a hub-and-spoke architecture, with the Cisco ONS 15600 Series MSSP at the core of the solution. The Cisco ONS 15600 Series combines the functions of multiple metro systems, including SONET/SDH multiplexers and digital cross-connect network elements, with support for all metro topologies and scalability up to 960 gigabits per second. The solution provides the capacity to continue growing Switch and Data's business and support more connectivity options for its customers.

Switch and Data deployed the Cisco ONS 15600 Series with Cisco Any Service Any Port (ASAP) cards, which support a modular approach to infrastructure growth. Cisco ASAP cards allow organizations to add additional bandwidth or support for additional services by changing line cards without requiring a massive upgrade of the platforms themselves. The solution allowed Switch and Data to equip the network with enough scalability to support the immediate expected growth, without making a large up-front investment in capacity that was not yet needed. The Cisco ONS 15600 Series also uses the same architecture and operating system as the Cisco ONS 15454 platforms that were already in place, speeding and simplifying the transition.

"When you have this kind of exponential, explosive growth, time is just not on your side," says Terrence Chatfield, director of research and engineering for Switch and Data. "Rather than forklift upgrade our entire infrastructure, we wanted a solution that could maximize our previous investment, both in equipment and the knowledge of our employees. That pointed us toward Cisco."

"Cisco is certainly a known quantity, and has a long history in both enterprise and carrier networking," adds Marashi. "We knew the level of experience and support we would get with Cisco today, and we knew Cisco would be there when we needed them in the future."

Along with the upgraded core at 111 Eighth Avenue, Switch and Data also deployed the Cisco ONS 15216 Metro dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) Platform at its 60 Hudson Street location, and connected the two sites with redundant 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-48 links. The solution provides Switch and Data customers with a cost-effective bridge between these two high-density, highly sought-after network connectivity hubs.

"Previously, if our customers had a presence at both facilities, they had to host in both or pay for expensive WAN connections," says Sampera. "Now, we can provide that for them. Our customers need only establish a presence at one site, and they can use our Metro Cross Connect service to gain access to all of the carriers at the other. It allows us to offer connectivity to more than 330 different carriers at whatever price, speed, or performance the customer needs."

The Cisco optical solutions at its New York facilities have given Switch and Data a more cost-effective, scalable network foundation for its business. The network architecture overhaul at 111 Eighth Avenue freed capacity in the network core - and within each Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP Chassis - that can support new customer business. Based on this additional capacity alone, Sampera expects the solution to pay for itself within two years.

However, the most important benefit is the new flexibility the solution provides to Switch and Data, and the enhanced capacity and connectivity options the company can offer customers. "These carrier hotels are extremely dense marketplaces," says Sampera. "With this upgrade, we can now tailor our solutions to the unique needs of our customers at each site. We can actually engineer solutions specific to individual suites."

Internally, the new network architecture means that adding capacity for a single customer does not require Switch and Data to boost the capacity of the entire network. "We can now plan our capacity upgrades and infrastructure investments to align more closely with those areas where we expect to see growth," says Marashi.

The enhanced connectivity between the two densest "carrier hotels" in New York also provides an attractive option for customers - and a new line of business for Switch and Data. "If customers need to connect to a carrier that's in only one of the carrier hotels, and they don't want to replicate their infrastructure in both buildings, they have to choose one site, and then pay a monthly recurring charge for WAN connectivity to the other," says Marashi. "That can be extremely expensive. Now, we can make all carriers at both facilities available to them through our Metro Cross Connect."

By upgrading the network with Cisco optical platforms, Switch and Data could maintain a common operating system throughout the facilities and support end-to-end provisioning - eliminating the need to configure circuits at each end of the architecture. Standardizing on Cisco technology has provided other benefits as well. "Choosing Cisco has definitely reduced our total cost of ownership, and reduced the impact this upgrade has had on our business," says Sampera. "In addition, a lot of our customers are also Cisco users. Since we connect directly to their networks, that allows for easier integration between platforms, but more importantly, between people and processes and tools. The Cisco platforms provide the streamlined interoperability we need to effectively support our customers."

To find out more about the Cisco ONS optical platforms, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/optical.