SOUTHERN CROSS CABLE NETWORK Increased network capacity and survivability using Ciena’s 5400 and 6500 platforms

Case StudyC

Southern Cross is an independent company that offers fully protected capacity solutions with low latency and high service availability to the markets of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, and the mainland U.S. The Southern Cross network, shown in Figure 1, comprises 28,000 kilometers of undersea cable and 2,000 kilometers of terrestrial cable configured for maximum reliability in a ring-based network topology.

Challenges

As bandwidth demands continue to increase year after year, the Southern Cross network was quickly approaching its maximum lit capacity, which was running at 620 Gb/s of aggregate capacity per side (1.2 Tb/s total). Southern Cross wanted a cost-effective network solution to augment the overall capacity of their undersea network assets while simultaneously increasing survivability, lowering network operating costs, and providing a platform for new future product offerings such as Optical Transport Network (OTN), 40GbE, and 100GbE services. The expansive nature of the Southern Cross undersea network includes spans as long as 8,000 kilometers that also had to be upgraded—a significant technological hurdle to overcome, especially at channel rates higher than 10 Gb/s.

Customer Commitment

Southern Cross is committed to upgrading their submarine and terrestrial networks on an ongoing basis to best leverage the latest transmission and intelligent switching technologies, thus providing greater functionality while simultaneously lowering overall network operating costs. This also ensures that their customers’

About the Client

The Southern Cross network expansion will involve a 400G capacity upgrade on each of its seven segments, taking lit capacity on each undersea cable to 1 Tb/s (per side) and total capacity on the network to 2 Tb/s. This will allow Southern Cross to continue offering fast, direct, and secure international bandwidth from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the mainland U.S.

needs are properly addressed in a timely manner such that mission-critical traffic is carried on the best technology available to the industry, and supports Southern Cross’ strategy of ongoing price revisions to leverage cost efficiencies for capacity upgrades. To meet growing undersea bandwidth requirements in the regions in which Southern Cross operates, the technology path to the future was to increase channel capacities from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s. As bandwidth on the Southern Cross network increases, moving the network to an intelligent control plane-based switched network was deemed the path forward.

Of primary importance, the chosen transport and switching technologies had to work together in an efficient and seamless manner over a network that traverses the vast Pacific Ocean and numerous terrestrial-based landing points. Southern Cross turned to Ciena’s award-winning coherent optical transmission and intelligent switching solution offering.

Solution

To cost-effectively increase the capacity and resiliency of their network, Southern Cross chose Ciena’s award-winning 6500 Packet-Optical Platform for capacity upgrades, and the 5430 Reconfigurable Switching System for intelligent switching, both shown in Figure 2. Together, these platforms enable a seamless end-to-end network solution operating as a single cohesive network managed by Ciena’s OneControl

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Figure 1. Southern Cross network

Figure 2. Ciena’s 6500 and 5430

Unified Management System—operating at Layers 0 and 1 today, with a possible migration path to Layer 2 in the future, as network demands continue to change.

The 5430 is the industry’s largest packet-optical switching platform available today, with 3.6 Tb/s of SONET/SDH/OTN switching capacity designed to transform the Southern Cross network into a scalable, flexible, and cost-reduced service-enabling infrastructure. Leveraging Ciena’s significant experience and field-proven history of assuring the world’s most critical networks, the 5430 brings SONET/SDH and OTN switching and protection capabilities to the Southern Cross network. These capabilities, facilitated by Ciena’s OneConnect Intelligent Control Plane, offer the ability to automate manual and error-prone operational tasks, such as service provisioning and the setting up of protection services. Real-time inventory capabilities ensure that Southern Cross knows exactly what is in their network and can use this data to perform “what-if” scenarios using powerful modeling tools, also available from Ciena. OneConnect’s protection capabilities set a new benchmark in network survivability against multi-failure cable cuts caused by such catastrophes as wide-scale earthquakes.

Within the Southern Cross network, the Ciena 5430 is to be deployed at landing sites requiring significant scalability, while the smaller 1.2 Tb/s 5410 will be deployed at landing sites with more modest growth projections. The 5410 and 5430 are both built from the same intelligent switching architecture, allowing for seamless interworking with reduced sparing requirements due to the cost-effective sharing of service modules across platforms to further reduce capital expenditures.

With the 5400 intelligent switches addressing network survivability and service flexibility, Southern Cross chose the industry-leading 6500 to cost-effectively and unobtrusively increase the overall traffic-carrying capacity of their wet plant assets. The 6500 is powered by Ciena’s WaveLogicTM Coherent Optical Processors—widely regarded as a breakthrough

technology in optical transmission. They cost-effectively scale submarine networks from 10G to 40G and 100G channel rates using simple planning and deployment methods, taking undersea cable to unheard-of capacities.

Since available bandwidth is a scarce resource in most submarine cables, optimizing spectral efficiency is always a prime objective for undersea cable operators. Ciena’s WaveLogic technology provides unmatched spectral efficiency, enabling increases over the previous generation’s 10G-based networks, without any changes to the existing undersea cable assets. Rather than deploying costly, time-consuming, and financially risky new undersea cables builds, performing simple channel upgrades at the landing stations is far more economically feasible and risk-averse.

Based on Ciena’s industry-leading WaveLogic coherent technology, the Southern Cross network expansion will involve a 400G capacity upgrade on each of its seven segments, taking lit capacity on each undersea cable to 1 Tb/s (per side) and total capacity on the network to 2 Tb/s. This will allow Southern Cross to continue offering fast, direct, and secure international bandwidth from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the mainland U.S. This increase in network capacity allows Southern Cross to meet the growing demands of existing customers while attracting new customers and reducing operating costs. Southern Cross is truly ready for whatever capacity demands the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) and New Zealand Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiatives may bring.

Seamless End-to-End Network Management

To ensure all network assets over land and under the sea are managed in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, Southern Cross chose Ciena’s OneControl for network management. OneControl allows Southern Cross to operate its network as a single network entity with a pool of available resources for the customers of today and tomorrow. Gone are the days of multiple solutions managing disparate networks within the overall network. OneControl ensures end-to-end network management simplification across Layers 0 and 1 on both the 5410/5430 and 6500 platforms. This provides Southern Cross with a comprehensive network-wide solution to manage its mission-critical networks, including multi-layer intelligence for rapid service turn-up, unsurpassed visibility through protocol layers for proactive/reactive troubleshooting, and efficient use of assets and bandwidth. The tight coupling of control plane intelligence and OneControl ensures all inherent benefits of Ciena’s industry-leading control plane intelligence are readily accessible.

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Benefits

Ciena’s 5400 and 6500 translate into clear and immediate benefits for Southern Cross:

> End-to-end solution operating as a single network entity managed by OneControl

> Significant channel capacity increase, from 10G to 40G/100G, all performed in-service

> Up to tenfold channel capacity increases without re-engineering the existing network

> Accelerated service turn-up times enabled by Ciena’s industry-leading OneConnect Intelligent Control Plane

> Significant reduction in footprint and associated power consumption through the consolidation of SDH/OTN/Ethernet functionalities for a more environmentally friendly network

> Efficient bandwidth allocation and switching intelligence throughout the network

> Enhanced proactive and reactive service monitoring across network assets over land and sea

> In-service growth path from SDH to OTN switching for seamless terrestrial network interworking

> In-service growth path from ring-based protection to intelligent mesh-based protection

NO RIP AND REPLACE

LEVERAGED SELLING

SOLUTIONSELLING

CONVERGED OPTICAL ETHERNET

Evolution of ON-Center, OMEA, ESM

Covers Switching, Transport, CESD

L 0-1-2 Service Managment

Extends to Partner Products

FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENT

Figure 3. OneControl unified management

Ready for the Future

Southern Cross owns and operates a critical communications link between Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and the U.S. Traffic demand on this undersea network is expected to grow at unprecedented rates resulting from the Australian NBN and New Zealand UFB initiatives, which are both intended to bring high-capacity access to the majority of their respective populations. These government-driven initiatives, coupled with the rapid adoption of multimedia services and cloud computing, required that the Southern Cross network have a strong evolution path in terms of capacity, reliability, and flexibility, which is achieved with the adoption of the combined Ciena 6500, 5400, and OneControl solution. This combined solution allows Southern Cross to meet the service demands of today and enables an elegant in-service upgrade path to future services such as OTN, 40GbE, and 100GbE, to meet the networking demands of tomorrow.

Summary

Challenges

> Supporting growing bandwidth demands stemming from the Australian NBN and New Zealand UFB initiatives

> Delivering network scalability, flexibility, and availability to meet diverse customer needs over the long term

> Simplifying end-to-end network management across layers 0 and 1 over land and under the sea

Solution

> Unified end-to-end network solution built upon 5400 switching, 6500 transport, and OneControl management

> 5400 providing intelligent grooming, switching, and OneConnect protection

> 6500 providing 40G/100G transport that leverages industry-leading WaveLogicTM Coherent Processors

> OneControl for operations, administration, management, and provisioning of all services across layers 0 and 1

Benefits

> Allows Southern Cross to manage its network over land and under the sea from a single management interface

> Massive scalability, flexibility, and improved availability to meet diverse customer needs over the long term

> In-service migration path from ring-based networks today to control plane-based mesh networks in the future

> Seamless support for SONET/SDH services today to future 10GbE, 100GbE, and OTN services

Networks that change the way you compete.

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