BT Connect Networks that think Optical Connect UK Fast, reliable, secure and affordable Connecting the heart of your organisation Your organisation and its people rely on its applications email, databases, transaction processing, order and billing data all of which are housed in your mission-critical datacentres. They are vital to the continued operation of your business, so you house them in more than one location to avoid a single point of failure, but link them together to make sure they continue to run as one. Of all the network links you have, the one that keeps your data available is the most important of all, the one that is at the heart of your organisation. It s got to be fast, secure and available. BT Optical Connect is the intelligent choice. With scalability from 1 to 32 wavelengths, capacity can increase from a 1Gbps to 320Gbps as your data volumes grows. A wide range of interfaces, including Ethernet, ESCON and Fibre Channel allows you to support the essential protocols for servers and storage. Using dedicated optical fibre, BT Optical Connect services are designed to give low latency and the availability you need for the heart of your organisation. including Ethernet LANs, Fiber channel, ESCON, FICON for storage networks and SDH WAN connectivity. Improve productivity Optical Connect offeres high bandwidth, high performance, high availability and secure services ideal for supporting critical business applications. It s scalable - Start small with a single 2.5Gbps wavelength (say 2 x Gigabit Ethernet) and grow up to 32 wavelengths, with up to 10Gbps per wavelength each carrying a mix of client interfaces as you require, all across the same fibres, so reducing cost and deployment complexity. Improved risk management and innovation - With Ethernet LANs, Fiber channel, ESCON, FICON for storage networks and SDH WAN connectivity interfaces and transparent transmission, Optical Connect services carry almost all protocols and so are ideal for legacy and future applications. Operational simplicity As Optical Connect service use the same Ethernet technology as Ethernet Local Area Networks, they are easy to use and support. Improved cost control With a fixed price and no usage charges, Optical Connect service allows you to easily control costs and your budget. Latency low latency Performance without compromise BT Optical Connect is a family of high-performance optical network services designed to deliver performance to businesses like yours, wherever you are in the UK. Use it to connect your data centre LANs and storage networks (SANs) at whatever speeds and protocols you need,
Site to Site Connectivity As organisations change, connecting sites economically in the same town, city or region is often a challenge. Improving operational efficiency can depend on new applications demanding higher performance and ever greater bandwidth. These growing demands can strain budgets. Optical Connect services could be your ideal solution. Optical Connect services features include: High bandwidth Optical Connect services offer secure, un-contended bandwidth that is scalable. Clients can start with a single 2.5Gbit/s or 10Gbit/s wavelength and increase the number of wavelengths as your bandwidth demands increase. High performance - As the service uses dedicated point to point optical fibre between your sites, you have the highest performance possible with data going in one end and come out of the other with the minimum of delay, almost no jitter or packet loss. So Optical Connect services are ideal for performance critical requirements. High availability - Because Optical Connect services are simple and very reliable. We offer a range of resilience options to meet all your availability needs, even for the most critical sites. It s also secure- BT has the fibre availability to cover right across the UK, so you can be sure that wherever your sites are, BT can get you there. But more importantly, your critical data is carried across fibres which are dedicated to you, which means you can be sure your traffic is securely transported, with predictable latency, end to end. We recognise that reliability comes from using the best components, so we selected optical hardware from leading optical networking vendors Ciena, Cisco and ADVA as part of our service, the same platforms we use in our own BT networks. BT delivers all this as a managed service from LAN port to LAN port, so you can be sure that your network is monitored and supported by an experienced nationwide field force 24 x 365, leaving you to concentrate on your business. In the unlikely event of a problem, we will have engineers to site with parts to effect a repair and deliver a target 4 hour SLA. So whether you want to connect datacentres or main offices, to link server clusters or for data replication, to create a futureproof network at the centre of your infrastructure to grow flexibly with your business, or add more resilience for business continuity, BT Optical Connect has a service to meet your needs Service Variants Dedicated Optical Fibre The service uses dedicated point to point optical fibre between sites for transmission. The maximum radial and route distance between sites depends on the service. BT Optical Connect offers three product variants: Local - up to 35km between two sites. ADVA platform Regional up to 70km between two sites. Ciena and Cisco platforms National over 70km between sites. Ciena platform. Chain Service Option In this configuration a number of Optical Connect bearer nodes are connected together to form a chain. A maximum of 25 bearer nodes can be linked into a chain. A bearer node consists of a number of Network Terminating Equipment (NTE) grouped into a single logical entity. Each bearer node can be included in only one chain. Wavelengths can be ordered between any two sites of the chain. Ring Service Option In this configuration a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 16 bearer nodes can be interconnected to form a ring. A bearer node consists of a number of NTEs grouped into a single logical entity. Each bearer node can be included in only one ring. Wavelengths can be ordered between any two nodes on a ring. In addition each wavelength can be specified to be routed in either direction around the ring. Each bearer in the ring is delivered with one NTE, the fibre route and optical filters at each end. Resilient Options We offer a range of resilient services to meet all your availability needs, even for the most critical sites:
Standard The standard service uses a single chassis, single optical fibre pair between the NTEs at each site to give 99.95% target availability. Resilience Access Option 1 - RA01 protect against fibre failure with two diversely-routed fibre pairs to a single chassis, improving target availability to 99.98%. Technical Details Speeds DWDM Optical Equipment Ciena, Cisco and ADVA Resilience Access Option 2 - RA02 Maximise your uptime by protecting against hardware failure too with dual chassis and diversely routed fibres. Target availability is 99.998%. Customer Controlled Protection Switching - Clients may want to provide automatic switch over using external infrastructure such as LAN and SAN equipment. Some protocols are sensitive to any disruption in service or to a change in the fibre route distance and may not tolerate switching from a primary to a resilient fibre path. In this case the client has full control over when and how the switch-over is carried out. Clients provided with dual RA02 services will be responsible for monitoring the availability of the fibre network and for switching to an alternative back up service. Clients deploying LAN and SAN equipment will rely on this equipment to detect a failure and provide the switch-over automatically. Double the Bandwidth Client Bandwidth System Capacity Resilience options from 100Mbps to 10Gbps 2.5Gbps to 320 Gbps Standard (99.95%) Fibre Resilience (99.98%) Fibre and Chassis resilience (99.998%) Topology Point to Point (A to B) Interfaces Ring (e.g. A to B to C to A) Chain (e.g. A to B to C to D) Ethernet: 10G Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 100M Fast Ethernet Fiberchannel: FC100, FC200, FC400, FC1200 FICON Customer may opt to purchase two Optical Connect RA02 systems, for operational reasons, then rather than leave the back-up system (including the expensive fibre) redundant for the majority of the time and it can be used to transport non-critical and critical data between sites. Wide geographic availability - Available where ever there is fibre, Ethernet Optical Connect services are available to over 99% of UK Business locations. Affordable - Optical Connect Services are surprisingly affordable and often cheaper than National Ethernet or IP VPN services. As the Optical Connect service is dedicated to you, it will have a flat charge and unlimited usage, so budgeting is easy. Multiple ports per wavelength Reach Contract Term Fibre Supplier Fibre shared with other customers? Managed Service ESCON Yes (subject to capacity) Anywhere in the UK 1, 3 or 5 year end to end: BT No Yes
Client Side Service Aggregation It is possible to aggregate a number of customer services using a single customer fibre facing card into a single DWDM wavelength. This reduces the space and power footprint of the customer site optical network terminating equipment and the efficient use of the available bandwidth on the fibre bearer. The client interface connection to each bearer port is provided via a service interface presented on a demarcation optical patch panel using SC/PC single-mode fibre or multi-mode fibre interfaces. Interfaces are available as 850nm multimode or 1310nm single mode. The demarcation patch panel will be the Network Termination Point (NTP) and is the demarcation point of the service. The demarcation patch panel also allows for optical attenuators to be placed in the panel to prevent either the customer equipment or the NTE RX interface from being damaged by the TX laser. The wavelengths can deliver multiple service interfaces providing the combined speed does not exceed the wavelength capacity by using MUXponder interface cards. For example two 1Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces (1.25 Gbit/s each) can be delivered on a single 2.5Gbit/s wavelength. Service Management and Restoration All BT Optical Connect services come with BT TotalCare service levels within tariff. It is provided solely over BT network fibre infrastructure. BT provides the total end-toend service, which includes the fibre network and the optical terminating equipment at the customer premises. BT has visibility of the entire Optical Connect service through the core network right up to each customer premises. As there is a single provider for the whole service the client has a single point of contact for service repair. In the unlikely event of a failure, the first line of defence is redundancy in your system: RA01 service uses one chassis terminating dual fibre pairs. Switchover is automatic and within 50msec, short enough that almost all applications will continue to operate without interruption RA02 service will continue operating over the other fibre pair, but rely on your LAN / SAN equipment to recover performance. Network Resilience - To transport vast amounts of mission critical data, clients will typically use Optical Connect services. The safeguard of this data is a top priority at the network strategy stage. BT s network coverage and ability to delivery diversely routed services allows BT to offer the level of resilience demanded by clients to support their core network requirements. The level of resilience and diversity can be demonstrated to the customer with a network routing diagrams produced by the BT Network team. In the event of a fibre failure the service can be switched to the resilient fibre path. Planned Engineering Works - All network providers need to carry out routine engineering work on their networks to improve and maintain the level of service provided to their clients. BT has business as usual processes in place for planned engineering works, where clients are informed 30 days in advance of when the work will be carried out. In the event of this work effecting one fibre path of your network, your Optical Connect service will not be disrupted, as your service will continue to function on the resilient fibre path. Standard service has no in-built resilience to failure. BT Optical Connect is managed from BT s own UK-based network management centres 24 x 365. At no extra cost to you, BT will respond to a reported or alarmed fault within 4 hours and restore service within one further hour. We will alert you to the failover, and report progress of the fault repair, sending engineers to site with parts to repair as appropriate. Proactive Management The Optical Connect service is remotely monitored and any faults detected will be proactively raised. BT remote monitoring can detect the following alarms: Network port down local and remote end (no light from the line fibre) Unreachable (ping failing to the management card, this will include local end power fail) High temperature alarm
If an alarm is detected and considered service affecting it will be confirmed by the BT Management Centre with the customer prior to progressing. BT monitors its transmission network 24x7x365 from its Network Management Centres (NMC). All the Optical Connect services are actively monitored and each of BT s services has dedicated procedures for fault diagnosis and analysis. Any service affecting events or events that have caused a loss of resilience on protected services are dealt with immediately with the internal target clear time of 5 hours. Repair of non-service affecting faults may be deferred until normal business hours if they occur outside business hours. The NMC will, where possible, remotely fix problems or dispatch engineers to site with the relevant parts for replacement. BT does not react to customer interface faults as these may be due to routine client maintenance tasks and BT expects the customer to report faults in the normal manner. Service Level Guarantee Optical Connect services are covered by an SLG for ontime delivery and another for repair within five hours of a total outage. If we fail to live up to our installation and repair promises, our Reduced Charges Scheme could offer you money off the following year s wavelength rental. Extensive expertise We have an extensive portfolio of network services to meet your requirements in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. We lead on Network Availability one of your top 3 priorities Telemark 2011. Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Pan European Network Service Providers Magic Quadrant for the 7th consecutive year. Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Global Network Services Providers Magic Quadrant for the 6th year. In 2011 we were recognized at the World Communications Awards as the Best Global Operator, Best Technology Foresight, Green Award, and Best Wholesale Carrier.