SAN JOSE, Calif., June 24, 2002 - Enterprise customers seeking to maximize their investment in metropolitan-area optical networks can now aggregate up to 40 data connections over a single wavelength using the Cisco ONS 15530, Cisco's new metro DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) solution, introduced today.

This "service aggregation" feature in the Cisco ONS 15530 delivers a whole new level of multiplexing efficiency to optical networking. By being able to consolidate multiple information streams over the same wavelength, customers can use more of the available bandwidth, which lowers the total cost of owning and managing their metro DWDM networks. As a result, customers can perform DWDM-optimized applications such as synchronous data replication (and other business resilience applications) at significantly reduced cost points.

"Enterprises have a strong focus on maximizing return on IT investments now," said Dave Dunphy, principal analyst of Optical Infrastructure at Current Analysis. "Metro DWDM and the kind of service aggregation features the Cisco ONS 15330 provide offer the tools to increase bandwidth efficiency to help meet those objectives."

In the initial version, a single Cisco ONS 15530 can multiplex up to 40 ESCON or Enterprise Systems Connection channels over one 10 gigabit-per-second wavelength. ESCON is a fiber optics-based storage protocol prevalent in large enterprise data center environments. Without the Cisco ONS 15530's service aggregation feature, users would need to dedicate a separate wavelength for each ESCON channel. A single ESCON channel, however, operates at 200 megabits per second, which would utilize less than two percent of the available bandwidth in a wavelength transmitting at 10 gigabits per second.

In future releases, the Cisco ONS 15530 will be able to aggregate multiple higher-speed networking and storage services such as Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over individual wavelengths. The Cisco ONS 15530 also comes ready to support additional storage and networking protocols including SONET/SDH, ATM, and FICON. Other advanced DWDM features include an Optical Supervisory Channel (OSC), used for management and performance monitoring, and four-channel Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (OADM) modules, allowing the Cisco ONS 15530 to be configured in point-to-point, ring, or meshed network topologies.

The Cisco ONS 15530 joins the Cisco ONS 15540 and the Cisco ONS 15200 series in Cisco's metro DWDM family, and further extends the Cisco COMET (Complete Optical Multiservice Edge and Transport) portfolio for enterprise customers. The Cisco ONS 15530 is capable of transporting a mixture of voice, data networking, storage, and video traffic using up to 32 individual streams of light (or wavelengths) multiplexed across a single pair of fiber optic cables. With each wavelength able to transport from 2.5 to 10 gigabits of information per second, the Cisco ONS 15530 solution offers a maximum capacity of 320 gigabits per second, making it ideal for high-bandwidth and high-capacity applications that power the data centers of large enterprises.

Business Continuance Solution with IBM

"Continuously available, high-speed data transfer is a critical business requirement for IBM's GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) customers, who often link eServer zSeries mainframes at multiple locations," said Peter McCaffrey, program director, IBM eServer zSeries. "The combination of the eServer zSeries with Cisco's advanced optical networking technology enables world-class business continuity while significantly reducing networking costs."

Extending the Cisco COMET Portfolio

Cisco COMET is a comprehensive strategy that uses Cisco's expertise in optical, IP, voice, data, and storage networking to provide enterprises and service providers a broad set of optical networking solutions able to satisfy the most diversified and demanding application requirements. For more Cisco COMET announcements today, please visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Pricing and Availability

The base Cisco ONS 15530 system is list priced at $54,000. The Cisco ONS 15530 is expected to be available in early July.