Nortel already enjoys a healthy lead in the market for storage over DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing), with IDC estimating that it has around 80 percent share of this segment. DWDM provides high bandwidth, but requires access to dark fiber and is generally limited to distances of around 200 km.
Sonet, by comparison, is ubiquitous, with an estimated 135,000 Sonet rings in North America alone, and can extend up to 10,000 km. "Fibre Channel is well established and Sonet is also well establishes," says James Opfer, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "It seems to be a very good meeting of technologies." (See our recent reports, Storage Over Optical and Making Sonet Storage-Friendly.)
However, Nortel's FC-over-Sonet interfaces will run at 1-Gbit/s -- even though the Fibre Channel industry has almost completely made the transition to 2-Gbit/s switches. Hunt maintains this isn't a huge drawback: First, 2-Gbit/s FC equipment is backward-compatible with the 1-Gig standard. Anyway, he says, most customers who adopt storage over Sonet will run at 1 Gbit/s or less. "To be honest, within the metro, once you get to 2-Gbit/s, people look to DWDM," he says.
Nortel will join several other vendors that already have offerings in this emerging space, including Akara Corp., Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA; Paris: CGEP:PA), LightSand Communications Corp., and Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU) (see SGI Elongates File System and EYT Waves In Optical SAN Service). Meanwhile, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) says it's also working up FC-over-Sonet plans, slated for delivery in the second half of 2003.
In the near term, Nortel sees a major carrier play for its storage-over-Sonet technology. Hunt says the company is working with "five or six" carriers in North America -- none of which he would name -- in various stages of deploying or planning storage-over-Sonet services based on the Nortel gear.
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