Ciena Whitepaper Southern Cross Cable Network

SOUTHERN CROSS
CABLE NETWORK
Increased network capacity and survivability
using Ciena’s 5400 and 6500 platforms
About the Client
The Southern Cross network
expansion will involve a 400G
capacity upgrade on each of its
seven segments, taking lit
capacity on each undersea cable
to 1 Tb/s (per side) and total
capacity on the network to 2 Tb/s.
This will allow Southern Cross to
continue offering fast, direct, and
secure international bandwidth
from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji,
and Hawaii to the mainland U.S.
Southern Cross is an independent company that
offers fully protected capacity solutions with low
latency and high service availability to the markets
of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, and the
mainland U.S. The Southern Cross network,
shown in Figure 1, comprises 28,000 kilometers
of undersea cable and 2,000 kilometers of
terrestrial cable configured for maximum
reliability in a ring-based network topology.
Challenges
As bandwidth demands continue to increase year after year, the Southern Cross
network was quickly approaching its maximum lit capacity, which was running at
620 Gb/s of aggregate capacity per side (1.2 Tb/s total). Southern Cross wanted a
cost-effective network solution to augment the overall capacity of their undersea
network assets while simultaneously increasing survivability, lowering network
operating costs, and providing a platform for new future product offerings such as
Optical Transport Network (OTN), 40GbE, and 100GbE services. The expansive
nature of the Southern Cross undersea network includes spans as long as 8,000
kilometers that also had to be upgraded—a significant technological hurdle to
overcome, especially at channel rates higher than 10 Gb/s.
Customer Commitment
Southern Cross is committed to upgrading their submarine and terrestrial networks
on an ongoing basis to best leverage the latest transmission and intelligent
switching technologies, thus providing greater functionality while simultaneously
lowering overall network operating costs. This also ensures that their customers’
C
Case Study
Unified Management System—operating at Layers 0 and 1
today, with a possible migration path to Layer 2 in the future,
as network demands continue to change.
The 5430 is the industry’s largest packet-optical switching
platform available today, with 3.6 Tb/s of SONET/SDH/OTN
switching capacity designed to transform the Southern Cross
network into a scalable, flexible, and cost-reduced serviceenabling infrastructure. Leveraging Ciena’s significant
experience and field-proven history of assuring the world’s
most critical networks, the 5430 brings SONET/SDH and OTN
switching and protection capabilities to the Southern Cross
network. These capabilities, facilitated by Ciena’s OneConnect
Intelligent Control Plane, offer the ability to automate manual
and error-prone operational tasks, such as service
provisioning and the setting up of protection services.
Real-time inventory capabilities ensure that Southern Cross
knows exactly what is in their network and can use this data
to perform “what-if” scenarios using powerful modeling
tools, also available from Ciena. OneConnect’s protection
capabilities set a new benchmark in network survivability
against multi-failure cable cuts caused by such catastrophes
as wide-scale earthquakes.
Figure 1. Southern Cross network
needs are properly addressed in a timely manner such that
mission-critical traffic is carried on the best technology
available to the industry, and supports Southern Cross’
strategy of ongoing price revisions to leverage cost
efficiencies for capacity upgrades. To meet growing
undersea bandwidth requirements in the regions in which
Southern Cross operates, the technology path to the future
was to increase channel capacities from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s
and 100 Gb/s. As bandwidth on the Southern Cross network
increases, moving the network to an intelligent control
plane-based switched network was deemed the path forward.
Within the Southern Cross network, the Ciena 5430 is to
be deployed at landing sites requiring significant scalability,
while the smaller 1.2 Tb/s 5410 will be deployed at landing
sites with more modest growth projections. The 5410 and
5430 are both built from the same intelligent switching
architecture, allowing for seamless interworking with
reduced sparing requirements due to the cost-effective
sharing of service modules across platforms to further
reduce capital expenditures.
With the 5400 intelligent switches addressing network
survivability and service flexibility, Southern Cross chose
the industry-leading 6500 to cost-effectively and unobtrusively
increase the overall traffic-carrying capacity of their wet plant
assets. The 6500 is powered by Ciena’s WaveLogicTM Coherent
Optical Processors—widely regarded as a breakthrough
Of primary importance, the chosen transport and switching
technologies had to work together in an efficient and
seamless manner over a network that traverses the vast
Pacific Ocean and numerous terrestrial-based landing points.
Southern Cross turned to Ciena’s award-winning coherent
optical transmission and intelligent switching solution offering.
Solution
To cost-effectively increase the capacity and resiliency of
their network, Southern Cross chose Ciena’s award-winning
6500 Packet-Optical Platform for capacity upgrades, and the
5430 Reconfigurable Switching System for intelligent
switching, both shown in Figure 2. Together, these platforms
enable a seamless end-to-end network solution operating as
a single cohesive network managed by Ciena’s OneControl
Figure 2. Ciena’s 6500 and 5430
2
technology in optical transmission. They cost-effectively
scale submarine networks from 10G to 40G and 100G
channel rates using simple planning and deployment
methods, taking undersea cable to unheard-of capacities.
Since available bandwidth is a scarce resource in most
submarine cables, optimizing spectral efficiency is always
a prime objective for undersea cable operators. Ciena’s
WaveLogic technology provides unmatched spectral
efficiency, enabling increases over the previous generation’s
10G-based networks, without any changes to the existing
undersea cable assets. Rather than deploying costly,
time-consuming, and financially risky new undersea cables
builds, performing simple channel upgrades at the landing
stations is far more economically feasible and risk-averse.
Based on Ciena’s industry-leading WaveLogic coherent
technology, the Southern Cross network expansion will
involve a 400G capacity upgrade on each of its seven
segments, taking lit capacity on each undersea cable to 1
Tb/s (per side) and total capacity on the network to 2 Tb/s.
This will allow Southern Cross to continue offering fast,
direct, and secure international bandwidth from Australia,
New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the mainland U.S. This
increase in network capacity allows Southern Cross to meet
the growing demands of existing customers while attracting
new customers and reducing operating costs. Southern
Cross is truly ready for whatever capacity demands the
Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) and New
Zealand Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiatives may bring.
NO RIP
AND REPLACE
LEVERAGED
SELLING
Evolution of
ON-Center, OMEA, ESM
Covers Switching,
Transport, CESD
FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENT
SOLUTION
SELLING
CONVERGED
OPTICAL ETHERNET
Extends to
Partner Products
L 0-1-2 Service
Managment
Figure 3. OneControl unified management
Benefits
Ciena’s 5400 and 6500 translate into clear and immediate
benefits for Southern Cross:
>
End-to-end solution operating as a single network
entity managed by OneControl
>
Significant channel capacity increase, from
10G to 40G/100G, all performed in-service
>
Up to tenfold channel capacity increases without
re-engineering the existing network
>
Accelerated service turn-up times enabled by Ciena’s
industry-leading OneConnect Intelligent Control Plane
Seamless End-to-End Network Management
To ensure all network assets over land and under the sea are
managed in the most efficient and cost-effective manner,
Southern Cross chose Ciena’s OneControl for network
management. OneControl allows Southern Cross to operate
its network as a single network entity with a pool of available
resources for the customers of today and tomorrow. Gone are
the days of multiple solutions managing disparate networks
within the overall network. OneControl ensures end-to-end
network management simplification across Layers 0 and 1 on
both the 5410/5430 and 6500 platforms. This provides
Southern Cross with a comprehensive network-wide solution
to manage its mission-critical networks, including multi-layer
intelligence for rapid service turn-up, unsurpassed visibility
through protocol layers for proactive/reactive troubleshooting,
and efficient use of assets and bandwidth. The tight coupling
of control plane intelligence and OneControl ensures all
inherent benefits of Ciena’s industry-leading control plane
intelligence are readily accessible.
3
>
Significant reduction in footprint and associated
power consumption through the consolidation of
SDH/OTN/Ethernet functionalities for a more
environmentally friendly network
>
Efficient bandwidth allocation and switching
intelligence throughout the network
>
Enhanced proactive and reactive service monitoring
across network assets over land and sea
>
In-service growth path from SDH to OTN switching
for seamless terrestrial network interworking
>
In-service growth path from ring-based protection
to intelligent mesh-based protection
Ready for the Future
Summary
Southern Cross owns and operates a critical communications link between Australia,
New Zealand, Fiji, and the U.S. Traffic demand on this undersea network is expected
to grow at unprecedented rates resulting from the Australian NBN and New Zealand
UFB initiatives, which are both intended to bring high-capacity access to the majority
of their respective populations. These government-driven initiatives, coupled with
the rapid adoption of multimedia services and cloud computing, required that the
Southern Cross network have a strong evolution path in terms of capacity, reliability,
and flexibility, which is achieved with the adoption of the combined Ciena 6500,
5400, and OneControl solution. This combined solution allows Southern Cross to
meet the service demands of today and enables an elegant in-service upgrade path
to future services such as OTN, 40GbE, and 100GbE, to meet the networking
demands of tomorrow.
Challenges
>
upporting growing bandwidth
S
demands stemming from
the Australian NBN and New
Zealand UFB initiatives
>
elivering network scalability,
D
flexibility, and availability to
meet diverse customer needs
over the long term
>
implifying end-to-end network
S
management across layers 0 and
1 over land and under the sea
Solution
Ciena may from time to time make changes to the products or specifications contained herein without notice. Copyright © 2012 Ciena® Corporation.
All rights reserved. CS045 5.2012
>
nified end-to-end network
U
solution built upon 5400
switching, 6500 transport, and
OneControl management
>
400 providing intelligent
5
grooming, switching, and
OneConnect protection
>
500 providing 40G/100G
6
transport that leverages
industry-leading WaveLogicTM
Coherent Processors
>
neControl for operations,
O
administration, management,
and provisioning of all services
across layers 0 and 1
Benefits
Networks that change
the way you compete.
>
llows Southern Cross to
A
manage its network over land
and under the sea from a single
management interface
>
assive scalability, flexibility,
M
and improved availability to
meet diverse customer needs
over the long term
>
In-service migration path from
ring-based networks today
to control plane-based mesh
networks in the future
>
eamless support for SONET/
S
SDH services today to future
10GbE, 100GbE, and OTN
services
1201 Winterson Road Linthicum, MD 21090
1.800.207.3714 (US and Canada)
1.410.865.8671 (outside US and Canada)
+44.20.7012.5555 (international)
www.ciena.com