SAN JOSE, Calif., June 24, 2002 - Pinnacle West Capital Corp., parent company of APS, Arizona's largest electricity provider, gained a 400 percent increase in available bandwidth and significantly improved its network's performance and reliability by deploying a Cisco ONS 15540-based metro DWDM optical network, Cisco announced today.

Owning the distinction as one of the first customers to purchase the Cisco ONS 15540, Pinnacle West has deployed three systems in full production between its two data centers in the Phoenix metropolitan area. One immediate benefit the company enjoyed was a spike in the available network bandwidth, said Dave Levandowsky, Information Systems manager for Pinnacle West.

"We went from having a maximum throughput of 622 megabits per second using our legacy ATM network to now transporting more than two gigabits per second of data using the Cisco ONS 15540 DWDM," said Levandowsky. "We have migrated nearly all of our IP-based networking traffic including data, video, and voice to this optical infrastructure and still have plenty of bandwidth left to scale for future needs. The increase in bandwidth has resulted in other benefits such as a noticeable increase in application performance and improved network reliability."

Pinnacle West initially turned to the Cisco ONS 15540 and metro DWDM technology to maximize the use of nearly 300 miles of fiber optic infrastructure, which the company owns and manages. This allowed Pinnacle West to augment its ATM-based transport network, which was rapidly running out of bandwidth, with a DWDM-based optical infrastructure that dramatically increased bandwidth availability without the company having to buy or lease additional fiber.

Today, Pinnacle West still maintains its ATM network as a backup to the DWDM network for business resilience purposes. More importantly, having the DWDM network as the primary transport infrastructure allowed Pinnacle West to extend the life of its ATM network and use it for more specialized functions, namely to transport traffic between the company's microwave systems.

Future initiatives over Pinnacle West's DWDM network include transporting storage networking traffic such as ESCON and Fibre Channel connections, as well as consolidating and transporting a number of low-speed SONET links efficiently over single wavelengths. Pinnacle West is also considering migrating its data network from Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet links. Because the Cisco ONS 15540 was built to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the transition should be seamless, Levandowsky said.

"The Cisco ONS 15540 provides us a very flexible and high-performance transport that improves the capacity, performance, and reliability of our network right now," Levandowsky said. "Simply put, it is the right technology for our enterprise today and the right technology to grow our network as our business requirements dictate."

The Cisco COMET Portfolio for Enterprise Customers

The Cisco ONS 15540 is a part of the Cisco COMET (Complete Optical Multiservice Edge and Transport) portfolio for enterprise customers. 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.