NEWS

Business Web Hosting Provider LeaseWeb to Invest in DWDM Technology

(HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Business web hosting provider LeaseWeb will make a significant investment – around $800,000 – in Dense Wavelength, Division Multiplexing (or DWDM) technology, it was announced recently. The Dutch company, which bills itself as “one of the world’s top-20 hosting providers”, will “intensify the existing optical fiber links in its hosting network” through this investment. The move will allow LeaseWeb to increase capacity and redundancy in its network backbone.

DWDM technology, which will be supplied by MRV Communications Inc. through Dutch distributor Dataman International, “intensifies the use of underground optical fiber links by bundling different colors of light through color lasers” making it possible to combine “up to 40 colors or 400 Gigabit Ethernet” on existing optical fiber. LeaseWeb’s utilization of the solution will initially increase its capacity to 400 Gigabits per second (Gbps) with the potential for a further increase to 1,200 Gbps. The company’s investment is part of a bigger investment plan for LeaseWeb’s new core-hosting network based on Cisco’s CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System).

“DWDM is a fairly expensive technology,” explained LeaseWeb’s Network Architect, Bastiaan Spandaw. “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 datacenter locations at EvoSwitch, Telecity and Nihkef, and then switch our existing connections.”

“Many of our clients want to be able to grow quickly when they need to,” added the Managing Director of LeaseWeb, Con Zwinkels. “It does not make any difference whether these are growth needs of Corporate enterprises, or Internet startups with growth needs in the area of streaming hosting. In order to be able to quickly meet those needs on an ad-hoc basis, our philosophy is that we always maintain twice as much bandwidth capacity in our network as our clients use. We are currently experiencing strong growth in bandwidth demand. DWDM will allow us to meet this demand for bandwidth at all times.”

LeaseWeb provides hosting solutions “geared towards the professional market” and its services include collocation, dedicated servers, web hosting, server virtualization, streaming, and domain name registration. Earlier this year, the company invested a substantial amount in two Cisco CRS-1 devices costing almost $2.4 million. The two CRS-1 devices (non-stop devices) have been delivered and are currently being programmed.



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