The card is for the 1830 Photonic Service Switch, the flagship DWDM box announced in 2008. (See AlcaLu Gets Tropical in the Metro.)

It's also designed to work with older Lucent DWDM boxes, the 1625 LambdaXtreme and 1626 Light Manager, but the 1830 can reach higher densities -- 500 Gbit/s per box, with each system filling one third of a rack, says Sam Bucci, AlcaLu's vice president of terrestrial networks.

AlcaLu won't consider the cards to be ready for volume shipping until the end of the month. But when asked if someone could get their hands on one today, Bucci says yes, that could be done.

The only coherent 100-Gbit/s DWDM product currently shipping comes from the former Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) division of Nortel Networks Ltd. that's now owned by Ciena. Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) is using the technology on its network in Europe. (See Verizon Switches On 100G in Europe, Ciena/Nortel Product Plans Revealed, and Ciena Closes Nortel MEN Purchase.)

AlcaLu is claiming an industry first of its own, though. Its 100-Gbit/s transmission uses just one carrier wavelength. Ciena's technology uses two carriers, although the transmission occupies just one spot on the ITU DWDM grid.

AlcaLu also says it doesn't need any guard bands -- unused portions of spectrum -- on either side of its 100 Gbit/s, thanks to proprietary tricks that the company isn't explaining in detail. Guard bands would normally be required in order to keep the 100-Gbit/s signal from interfering with neighboring 10- or 40-Gbit/s signals.

Like most of the systems vendors developing coherent 100-Gbit/s technology, AlcaLu designed the two crucial chips on its own, those being an analog/digital converter (ADC) and a digital signal processor (DSP). "Bell Labs has been working in earnest over the last -- oh, half decade or so, I'd say -- to come up with the right algorithms," Bucci says. (See 100G Watch: Components Wanted.)

The company also developed its own 100-Gbit/s optics.

AlcaLu plans to use this same coherent technology in a 40-Gbit/s card, which won't be available for a few weeks yet, but which will feature in the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) subsea network

And it's going to keep working the chip technology to get to higher speeds.

"We're getting pinged by our customers for speeds in excess of 100 Gbit/s, from a multiplexing perspective, not just a router perspective, so we're going to continue the program," Bucci says.

Unlike Ciena, AlcaLu doesn't have any deployments to crow about yet, but the company did run a trial for Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF), showing off the ability to run 100 Gbit/s alongside 10- and 40-Gbit/s wavelengths. And last week, Japanese carrier SoftBank Corp. used the 100-Gbit/s card in the tradeshow network at Interop Tokyo. (Bucci admits the show didn't need all 100 Gbit/s.)

All told, AlcaLu claims it's got about 20 carriers testing its 100-Gbit/s cards.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading

The cloud storage competition just got a little more crowded.

Verizon (NYSE:VZ) Business on Tuesday launched its Verizon Cloud Storage Storage-as-a-Service offering, an enterprise cloud storage service that the provider said tackles the explosion of storage requirements. According to Forrester Research, data requirements are growing at 20 percent to 40 percent annually, leaving companies stressing over where to store and retrieve data. If that growth rate rings true, that means 100 TB of production storage capacity today will balloon to nearly 372 TB over the next five years.

"Managing these growing volumes of data is increasingly difficult," said Patrick Verhoeven, Verizon Business' cloud service product manager. "How do you cope with this explosive data growth?"

The cloud-based storage offering from Verizon comes as Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) continue to make strides in the cloud storage arena and the competition between the two heats up. And while Verizon expects to bump into the likes of Amazon and others in the increasingly competitive cloud storage market, Verhoeven said Verizon is taking a different tack.

"Our approach to cloud storage is different than Amazon's," he said, adding that while Amazon is a solid fit for consumers, Verizon Cloud Storage is more suited for enterprises. "We're not approaching this market trying to be the cheapest cloud storage out there. Amazon has a good product. We serve a different type of customer."

Verhoeven said that type of customer is mostly concerned more with the security, scalability and manageability of data than leveraging the lowest cost service.

Verizon Cloud Storage is a pay-as-you-go storage offering that can be used as a stand-alone solution or to augment storage area networking (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) tools. Verizon will launch the service in the U.S. and 16 other countries next month. It features physical and logical security, such as secure multi-tenant file system and encrypted data transfers. It also allows for different methods to access stored data, including software, APIs and third-party applications. Meanwhile, companies can select where data is stored.

At the outset, Verizon (NYSE:VZ) will utilize the storage delivery network of Nirvanix, a cloud storage service provider, leveraging Nirvanix's five-node delivery network. Later this year, Verizon will build a series of five to 10 "on-net" nodes into Verizon data centers, offering more integration with other Verizon cloud services.

The service is managed via a Web portal that lets admins manage users through various accounts and select storage nodes and set up policies. Users can also view detailed reports, open and view service requests and access other Verizon services through the portal.

"Our customers have complete control over where they put their data and how many copies of that data they need," Verhoeven said.

Verizon Cloud Storage pricing is "consistent with other cloud storage services in the marketplace," Verhoeven said, noting that it lists at 25 cents per GB of storage and users can receive a price break based on the number of copies stored and monthly volume commitments. And for bandwidth and network access to reach storage the cost is 10 centers per GB in and 20 cents per GB out.

Along with the new cloud storage offering, Verizon also launched a pair of Verizon Data Retention Services, new consulting services that give users insight into where their data is currently stored, how it is used and accessed and to help align their storage policies and practices with business objectives. The services include the new Data Discovery and Retention Policy Assessment, which discovers customer's data and assesses existing policies for the flow, storage and handling of that data. The second service, Data Retention Policy Development, helps companies develop a formal storage and backup policy for data and a roadmap for implementations.

The launch of Verizon Cloud Storage is the latest in a string of cloud services from Verizon, which has been trumpeting its "everything-as-a-service" approach for the past several months. Last month, Verizon revealed a three-phase cloud security services plan and, earlier this year, Verizon updated its on-demand Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) cloud computing infrastructure.

By Andrew R Hickey, CRN

Adtran said today it will help Frontier Communications drive fiber-to-the-node to many of the Verizon territories Frontier acquired last year.

Currently, just over 60% of the Verizon properties Frontier acquired have access to broadband services. Frontier acquired more than 4.8 million rural access lines in 14 states in the deal.

As part of closing the acquisition, Frontier and Verizon voluntarily agreed with the FCC to accelerate broadband delivery to those customers. The agreement included deploying broadband at speeds of at least 3 Mb/s downstream to at least 85% of transferred lines by the end of 2013 and to increase that speed to 4 Mb/s by 2015.

To help drive that roll-out, Frontier will use ADTRAN’s Total Access 5000 Multi-Service Access and Aggregation Platform (MSAP) and Total Access 1100 and 1200 Series Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) products, the companies said. The deployments are part of a plan by Frontier to speed broadband deployment out to some initial areas within 180 days of the Verizon deal close, said Kevin Morgan, director of marketing for the carrier division at Adtran.

“It’s pretty unique in that we are delivering turnkey services with [the products] for applications including fiber to the home, fiber to the node and IP DSLAM,” Morgan said, noting that Frontier has been a long-standing Adtran customer.

Upon completion of its transaction with Verizon, Frontier will become one of the largest Independents, serving more than 6 million access lines in 27 states.

For Adtran, the win is definitely notable but comes amidst a planned blitz of customer fiber win announcements among Tier 2 and 3 customers, including recent deals with Bay Springs, Millry Telephone and Reliance Connects.

Those customer wins will be huddled around three main deployment scenarios: fiber to the home, carrier Ethernet and service migration, said Morgan. But the reality is that the telco business case for fiber deployment today typically involves two or all three of those applications – in particular, balancing the need to manage the move to next-generation technology and services.

“What we’re finding is that they can’t just throw away the network they have in place,” Morgan said. “It’s becoming just as important, from a business case perspective, to be able to prove in and extend the assets they already have in place while extending them to generate new service revenues.”

By Rich Karpinski

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