Calgary is considered Canada’s most wired city. In the last 10 years, it experienced a boom in its population and economy that led to the explosion in demand for communications and computing services including those of the city itself. Calgary needed to future-proof its IT infrastructure to sustain growth and anticipate and deliver future user demands.

An Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) case study, Innovation Agenda: Calgary keeps progressing with its new MPLS network, provides a clear picture of the strain on Calgary’s legacy network. It had not only started to show its age, the city was also seeing rapid increases in demand and simple wear and tear that was pushing the network to its breaking point.

“We were definitely at end-of-life on our existing network infrastructure,” said Doug Hodgson, the City’s Chief Information Officer. This spurred the City to seek out a technology partner that would help them determine the best way to make its network viable in the next generation of telecommunications. The City turned to Alcatel-Lucent to develop an MPLS setup to enable a new state-of-the-art design.

“Fiber exhaust is always one of the issues when you own a fiber plant,” said Dave Basto, Network Infrastructure Leader for the City. “Without a network to multiplex that traffic, you’re always going to encounter it. This (MPLS network) will help us in that regard tremendously and allow us to expand our fiber plant more efficiently.”

As highlighted in this Alcatel-Lucent video, The Calgary Story: Journey to a Smart City, Calgary needed to completely revamp its existing network architecture. In working with Alcatel-Lucent to achieve smart cities initiatives, Calgary was able to roll out a solution that will not only benefit the City, but also its citizens.

Calgary has roughly 30 different business units that run business operations across the geographic area. These business operations are very tech savvy and always have been. The goal was to stay ahead of the curve in terms of the use of technology. As the demand for services continued to expand, there was a clear need identified for a next generation technology approach.

As part of its smart cities initiative, Calgary not only wanted to ensure quick provisioning of services, it was also important to deliver secure services, lower the operating costs, guarantee interoperability and interagency communication, and be environmentally resposnsible. Separate networks for agencies that must come together for emergency response, for instance, can delay communications and put citizens at risk. It was important to put all services on the same reliable and protected network.

By building out the new MPLS network, Calgary has effectively created a foundation for all future applications including providing infrastructure that will enable its power company to provide end-to-end smart grid capabilities. As the technology world continues to evolve and 4G LTE (News - Alert) networks continue to build out and 4G applications in demand, the City of Calgary is ready for it. They now have a platform that will allow them to burnish in a service for any application.

One new capability under the smart cities approach for Calgary is the ability to quickly provision new services, which they were unable to do before. In the past, the provision of a new service could take weeks, if not months. Today, such a service can be provisioned in a matter of hours.

Essentially, the City of Calgary built their own carrier cloud. In doing so, they have created the ability to reduce their operational expenditures and to provide next-generation services to their citizens and to their agencies across multiple needs within the City. ,

Edited by Peter Bernstein

Demands on data centers are greater than ever. For the first time, network capacity is demand-driven by the consumer, not supply-driven by the network provider. While Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) in a recent TechZine article, “A Changing Market Environment Demands a High Leverage Network,” notes that bandwidth demand will grow between 45 and 85 times over the next five years, supply will only grow between 10 and 30 times its current network capacity.

As a result of this change in the “new normal”, vendors have been busy launching next-generation data center architectures and solutions to deal with the new demand. However, it is sometimes overlooked that these data centers connecting over the wide-area-network (WAN) are an even more critical factor.

That’s because the old service provider architecture of an active and backup data center pair no longer is adequate to meet the demands of virtual computing and modern storage needs.

“This new generation of virtual computing and storage resources,” noted a recent white paper by Alcatel-Lucent, Optimal Solutions for Data Center Connect (DCC). It went on to explain that, “typically require many data centers to support their enterprise customer base. Low latency transport enables multi-datacenter architectures, where all data centers are connected together with a scalable and redundant mesh of high-speed links.”

The leading technology to provide these data center connect (DCC) requirements is Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transport.

“DWDM is the only solution that enables full network flexibility and adaptability at speeds of 100G and beyond, quick service turn-up to meet dynamic bandwidth requirements, ultra-low latency connectivity, and transport-grade reliability,” according to the white paper. “Ultimately, DWDM solutions enable the highest throughput for DCC at the lowest total cost of ownership.”

Leading the way with DWDM is Alcatel-Lucent, which offers data center connect solutions that include the company’s 400G Photonic Service Engine—which is touted as the first-ever commercially available electro-optics chip capable of driving traffic up to 400 gigabits per second (Gb/s). This versatility dramatically boosts the performance of 100G networks today and lays the foundation for 400G transport in the future.

The Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch is the company’s best-in-class DWDM technology, including 100G coherent optics, T-ROADM (News - Alert), photonic OA&M, and metro to long haul reach, according to the paper. Scaling higher than 2 TB in a single chassis, and as low as a single slot version, the 1830 PSS also supports interchangeable line cards. This fourth generation of this solution was developed to maximize wavelength utilization levels, while meeting strict service level agreements (SLAs) with ultra-fast restoration and coordinated network management.

“The 1830 PSS decreases operating expenses (OPEX (News - Alert)) through industry-leading power efficiency <2 W/Gb/s, and automated provisioning and restoration through a G-MPLS control plane,” the paper noted. “G-MPLS/Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON) also supports automated topology and services discovery, and supports optimized path computations to minimize latency across the network.”

Added the paper: “This is the solution of DWDM and T-ROADM at 100G that service providers need today for DCC.”

For most of the history of the communications industry, the saying, “build it and they will come,” was the rule. However, given the data storm we are in and which is accelerating, concentration needs to be not just on interactions within data centers or private cloud interactions but also between data centers be they public, private or part of a hybrid solution. This means speed and lots of bandwidth. It is why 400G is going to be so important and why adoption of 100G solutions is already picking up momentum.

Edited by Peter Bernstein

The cloud has changed the way that consumers and businesses relate to each other, but this has put massive pressure on the data center. From real-time applications and virtualization to desktop presence information and video on demand, the limits of the network are pushed on an almost daily basis.

Meeting the challenge of the data center is Alcatel-Lucent, according to a report last year by Current Analysis (News - Alert) on data center switching infrastructure, which listed Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) as “Very Threatening”—which in this case means they are poised to be market leaders i.e., threats to other vendors.

Part of that is because of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network (AFN), which understands devices as well as associated applications to prioritize and route traffic intelligently, boosting performance while reducing operating expense.

“Alcatel-Lucent is very threatening in the data center with both scale and market presence to weather any storm. ALU brings years of carrier class experience and design concepts to the enterprise data center solution with resilience and simplicity that have long been heralded as critical attributes of the most demanding networks on the planet, telephony,” according to Mike Spanbauer, Current Analysis service director of business technology and software.

Spanbauer noted that increasingly the market is moving toward an application-aware network environment, which gives Alcatel-Lucent and its AFN a head start.

Alcatel-Lucent’s AFN helps the company deliver a mesh architecture multi-site data center solution with next generation management capabilities. The resulting software defined network (SDN) provides connectivity across a range of data center deployment models scaling from providing cost effective solutions for server farms of smaller enterprises to multi-site virtualized data centers and "private" clouds for large enterprise. The resulting architecture provides resilient, low-latency any-to-any connectivity.

With the Alcatel-Lucent AFN, enterprises also can support multi-site data centers. Spreading the data center switching fabric across multiple sites creating a path to private cloud computing.

AFN also helps data centers manage their virtualized environments.

“Virtual Network Profiles, or vNPs, for example, automatically optimize application performance, while Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregators eliminate the need for virtual switches,” notes Alcatel-Lucent. They add that, “Shortest Path Bridging determines the most effective routing of application data traffic. All of these combine to increase an enterprise's Network IQ and help it meet the demands of an increasingly mobile, real-time and virtualized enterprise.”

So while data center demands have increased, so have the solutions to meet those demands. Applications fluency and SDNs are very likely in your future.

Edited by Peter Bernstein