NEWS

LeaseWeb Invests In DWDM Tech

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) - Business hosting provider LeaseWeb is improving its optical fiber hosting network by investing in optical Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technology, which intensifies the use of optical fiber links by bundling different colors of light through color lasers.

By David Hamilton

According to the company's Tuesday announcement, this almost $800,000 investment will enable Netherlands-based LeaseWeb to create additional capacity and redundancy in its network's backbone in the Amsterdam region.

Instead of one color used for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, LeaseWeb's DWDM technology works with a pallet of 40 colors, delivering 400 Gb Ethernet on the existing optical fiber. Initially, this will provide LeaseWeb's optical fiber network with an additional capacity of 400 Gbps, which will be increased to 1,200 Gbps.

This investment in DWDM is part of LeaseWeb's overall plan for its new core-hosting network. Based on Cisco's showpiece CRS-1, the new network will be interlinked by means of 186 miles (or 300 km) of optical fiber in the Amsterdam region. A total of 10 optical fiber links will each travel different paths, via the mesh protocol, to locations in Amsterdam Zuidoost, Amsterdam Science Park, Schiphol-Rijk and Haarlem.

LeaseWeb uses the optical fiber infrastructure in the Amsterdam region for interconnections with carriers, Internet exchanges and the four different data centers used by LeaseWeb, including the carbon neutral EvoSwitch data center (www.evoswitch.com). Special redundancy modules in the DWDM equipment will increase the new network's capacity.

"DWDM is a fairly expensive technology," LeaseWeb network architect Bastiaan Spandaw said in a statement. "But it significantly improves the scalability of our network instead of continuously having to add new cables. What's more, DWDM is relatively easy to implement. It's simply a matter of installing the DWDM equipment in our core data center locations at EvoSwitch, Telecity and Nihkef, and then switch our existing connections."

The DWDM equipment will be supplied by MRV Communications (www.mrv.com) through Dutch distributor Dataman International.
Earlier this year, LeaseWeb invested almost $2.4 million in two Cisco CRS-1 devices which LeaseWeb said have been delivered and are currently being programmed to play a crucial role in the new hosting network, and will couple all the data centers in the its network with the outside world.

Amsterdam is the hub of LeaseWeb's international network, which includes 12 European and US locations.





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