Service providers appear to be leaving the work of developing protocols for more efficient Sonet/SDH-based SANs in the hands of their suppliers. According to Steve Wilson, the ad hoc chairman of the FC-BB-3 project and a principal engineer at Brocade, not a single carrier is presently involved in the work.
No worries, project participants say. "Carriers have their hands full right now. But somebody is going to realize at some point that this is a great opportunity to make money," says William Collette, CTO of CNT, which has been active in T11 FC Backbone projects from the start.
Collette says a lot of customers in metro areas realize they need to create synchronous mirroring and backup facilities that span not just nearby areas but the entire country. Recent power outages that affected New Jersey, for example, have been a wakeup call for New York City financial institutions. Carriers stand to make money from this fresh demand for more and better storage networking, especially if they can run it over their existing infrastructure -- such as Sonet.
"We're absolutely seeing more and more clients looking to Sonet to support some of their SAN applications," says Tom Williams, a solution architect with CentrePath Network Inc. (formerly known as GiantLoop), which specializes in offering outsourcing and consulting for customers with IT centers in metro areas. He says enterprises still face issues of latency in Sonet networks, but FC-BB-3 should help streamline performance a bit.
Industry sources say carriers are already mulling how they can offer services that combine Fibre Channel extension with Gigabit Ethernet -- a kind of universal metro services for all traffic types. That was the in part the reason Ciena bought Akara last year (see Ciena Plunks Down $45M for Akara and Cisco Joins Sonet SAN Club). While carriers may not be fully aware of what's happening with FC-BB-3, sources say they're nonetheless committed to the goal of better Sonet SANs.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
