EMC, Nortel Tie Optical Knot

Like a couple that has been living together for years, Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) have finally decided to marry their services to help enterprises protect their data over remote networks.

Nortel and EMC today announced their Business Continuity over Optical Network service for enterprises looking to use metropolitan area networks (MANs) and wide area networks (WANs) for remote mirroring. The service brings together EMCs networked storage systems and remote replication software with Nortel’s DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) technology, plus a business continuity assessment service from the companies’ shared experiences. Eventually, the companies say the service will be expanded to include storage over Sonet (see Storage Over Optical).

Nortel and EMC already have more than 200 joint customers, mostly large banks, manufacturing companies, government agencies, and healthcare organizations. The new service will use best practices based on their experiences with those customers.

"This is more of an evolution of what EMC and Nortel have been doing for quite some time," says Sterling Perrin, senior research analyst at IDC. "They’re taking it one step further. We view Nortel as the SANs-over-DWDM market leader, and EMC is quite powerful on the storage side. Now they’re offering consulting services to help enterprises design and build out extended SANS."

Specific products included as part of the offering are EMC’s Symmetrix and Clariion networked storage systems; EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and MirrorView remote replication software; and Nortel’s OPTera Metro 5000 OPTera Metro 5000 Multiservice Platforms, which support both Sonet and DWDM.