Most financial services organizations operate multiple major sites, and end-users at each of these sites expect high-performance access to applications and information across data centers and the entire enterprise. They don’t understand—or tolerate—WAN bottlenecks. Developers of financial IT applications do not want to be constrained by WAN bandwidth and latency—particularly for time-sensitive applications such as arbitrage or trading programs—and WAN connectivity must be able to support ever-increasing traffic loads.

Challenges

WANs must deliver the throughput required for the IT applications that are strategic to the business. Availability is a major concern, since the cost of network downtime can often exceed $1 million per hour. Security is critical so that organizations can comply with regulatory requirements for protecting client privacy, and network latency needs to be minimized so the WAN can accommodate the time-sensitive performance requirements of mission-critical financial applications. Additionally, ongoing network costs must be controlled by efficiently managing bandwidth.

Solution

Flexible WAN solutions are needed to deliver to high-performance, inter-site LAN connectivity for the applications that are critical today, and they must be able to adapt to the unforeseen applications of tomorrow as well. Financial services organizations need the ability to implement simpler WANs that provide not only the bandwidth and controls necessary for high-performance inter-site LAN connectivity, but also to connect storage networks over the same infrastructure.

Ciena's offerings

Adaptive WAN solutions from Ciena allow organizations to cost-effectively link LANs over high-performance WANs, and programmable hardware enables the network to adapt to future applications with a simple software download. The Adaptive WAN architecture maximizes employment of lower-layer networking techniques that minimize latency, maximize bandwidth efficiency and maintain applications transparency. Ciena offers bandwidth optimization advantages that can influence both cost and performance. Adaptive WANs operate at Layer 1 or Layer 2, and are significantly less complex than WANs that operate at higher layers. Adaptive WANs are not hampered by the several-seconds long restoration times associated with IP infrastructure restoration. Additionally, LAN and storage traffic can be combined over the same network, and solutions based on Ciena’s Adaptive WAN architecture are qualified by all major storage vendors, including EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, McData and Qlogic.

Benefits

• Inter-site LAN connectivity can be implemented across any distance. Adaptive WANs have already been successfully deployed in many financial applications across transcontinental and transoceanic distances
• Adaptive WAN solutions offer the high-availability levels required for remote LAN connectivity, and have proven five 9s (99.999%) and six 9s (99.9999%) availability in production financial networks
• With multiprotocol, hardware-based data compression, efficient protocol mapping and dynamic bandwidth allocation, Ciena Adaptive WAN solutions minimize leased line costs with more efficient bandwidth utilization
• Through minimized latency and maximized throughput, Adaptive WANs enable high-performance, long-distance data center connectivity
• As opposed to application-aware networks, applications transparency minimizes expensive and time-consuming applications tuning and debugging for the initial deployment and for every software update, bug fix, service pack, etc.
• Ciena’s FlexiPort technology provides software-programmable ports that minimize capital expenses and maximize flexibility and scalability
• Ciena’s Adaptive WAN solutions can eliminate external switching/routing equipment for many scenarios so financial institutions can reduce equipment costs