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Table Of Contents
Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM Multiservice Aggregation Platform
Reliability Through Redundancy and Design
Customer Success Story
Federated Investors Selects "Gold Standard"
for Disaster RecoveryLeading Investment Firm Deploys Cisco ONS 15500 Optical DWDM Network and EMC Synchronous Mirroring
Background
Federated Investors, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest investment managers in the United States, managing $198 billion in assets. Federated manages more than 135 mutual funds and closed-end funds, as well as various separately managed accounts. Federated ranks in the top 2 percent of money market fund managers in the industry, and it ranks in the top 4 percent of fixed income fund managers.
Challenge
To successfully manage $198 billion in assets, Federated investment analysts must rely on hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of rapidly changing data points. Market trends, stock movements, and political developments are only a few of the variables that analysts monitor and assess to determine which funds to invest in and how best to achieve customer investment objectives.
Analysts rely on mission-critical applications to accomplish these objectives. Their inability to access these applications can result in billion-dollar losses due to incorrect decisions and incalculable damage to customer relations and brand image.
While business continuance has always been a high priority at Federated, following the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, it took on a new urgency. This incident led Federated to implement a robust disaster recovery plan as part of a recently initiated major overhaul of its network infrastructure.
Federated had decided not only to upgrade the infrastructure at the corporate headquarters, but also to build a new remote data center 50 kilometers away as part of their disaster recovery solution. This facility would serve two purposes--to provide additional office space for Federated departments and to house a disaster recovery facility.
The company upgraded its data center at its headquarters with Cisco® Catalyst® 6509 switches, Cisco PIX® firewalls, Cisco VPN 3015 concentrators, and Cisco CSS 11000 Series content services switches. To provide disaster recovery, Federated deployed EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) to synchronously mirror data from its headquarters storage area network (SAN) to backup storage arrays in the new remote data center.
Synchronous mirroring is the "gold standard" in data replication providing the highest level of availability with recovery times in typically less than 2 hours. It helps ensure that multiple synchronized copies of data exist at multiple sites or data centers. Every write-to-disk operation is synchronously replicated across a network to a storage array in an alternative data center. The synchronous application that resides on the intelligent controller waits for both disk drives to complete writing data before it returns an acknowledgment to the input/output requestor or initiator.
Synchronous mirroring is sensitive to latency and time delays. Therefore, when Federated decided to deploy these applications across distances of up to 50 kilometers, the overriding question was, which transport technology could provide the performance it needed at an acceptable cost point?
Federated first considered implementing SONET OC-24 (1.25 Gbps) or OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) connections. But after consulting with EMC, Federated determined that dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) across a metro optical network was the premiere option.
"EMC told us that the only way we could be sure of complete accuracy was if we ran fibre channel in native mode," says Joe Nicoletti, telecom manager at Federated. However, they were unable to accomplish this across an OC-n connection. "It would've required channel extenders at each end to convert the protocol for transmission, then to reconvert it back to fibre channel-- introducing a significant amount of unwanted delay," he says. "That was a major determining factor."
Federated also saw the scalability of DWDM as a key benefit. "The issue was how big could we get, and how fast could we get there," says Ray Domachowski, vice president of operations at Federated. "If we put in OC-24, and then needed to scale to OC-48, we'd have to wait 60 to 90 days for the carrier. Plus we'd have all of the carrier upgrade charges. With DWDM, we can add capacity in days and our fiber costs are fixed so it's only incremental cost to scale."
Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM Multiservice Aggregation Platform
Federated negotiated with the local fiber provider, DQE Communications (a division of Duquesne Light, an energy services company in the Pittsburgh area) to lease dark fiber for 10 years. To generate the lambdas over the fiber, Federated selected the Cisco ONS 15530 multiservice aggregation platforms.
The Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM platforms excel at dramatically increasing network capacity by aggregating multiple services onto a single wavelength, compared to other technologies such as ATM that can support only one service per network connection. The Cisco ONS 15530 can transmit up to eight Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or IBM Fiber Connection (FICON) services, or up to 40 Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON) services per DWDM wavelength, supporting both storage and data network requirements. This high density translates into capital and operational savings for customers who can utilize each wavelength more efficiently and can operate with fewer platforms. The Cisco ONS 15530 also supports other traffic types including digital video, SONET/SDH, ATM, and other legacy protocols to allow customers to consolidate all of their storage, data, and legacy applications over a single, high-capacity DWDM network.
Federated purchased four Cisco ONS 15530 platforms and deployed them in two separate point-to-point segments--an east path and a west path--both running on separate fiber from the main data center to the back-up data center. It configured the transponders on the Cisco ONS 15530 on each path to generate three 2.5 Gbps wavelengths--two wavelengths were dedicated to the SAN Fibre Channel traffic and the third wavelength delivered a Gigabit Ethernet service for data applications such as email, marketing, and web traffic (see diagram in Figure 1).
Because Federated was an early user of the Cisco ONS 15530, the multiplexing cards had not yet been developed. But whenever it needs to expand, the company can take advantage of the cost savings of multiplexing various services onto a single wavelength.
"The Cisco ONS 15530 gives us future service flexibility, which was a key selling point," says Nicoletti. "In the future, as our needs expand, we could use the 8-port Fibre Channel/Gigabit Ethernet multiplexer card and send additional Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet services over our existing wavelengths."
Reliability Through Redundancy and Design
Redundancy is built into every part of Federated's transmission infrastructure. First, each Cisco ONS 15530 chassis includes redundant processors and switch fabric modules, optical filters, and power supplies. A robust, fault-tolerant design was used in which redundant Cisco ONS 15530 platforms were placed at two sites with each platform connecting to a completely separate fiber path between sites.
"Unlike a carrier that might provide two sets of fiber but then run them through the same conduit into the building, we deployed the fiber such that each set has a separate building entrance," says Domachowski. "We're completely redundant from chassis to chassis."
At the backup data center, Federated maintains a staging server that's dedicated to failover for specific applications. If a disaster strikes at the primary data center, Federated IT personnel go to the backup center, mount the disks with the recently mirrored data, and bring up the applications. Federated has run numerous test simulations to help ensure success. "We estimate that, in the event of a disaster, our critical applications can be up and running at the other data center within two hours," says Nicoletti.
The platforms themselves have also been very reliable. "Our Cisco ONS 15530 platforms have been up since we plugged them in way back in January 2002," says Domachowski. "The system has been rock solid."
The design has been so reliable that when IT maintenance did a planned outage and took one path of the infrastructure down, "if they hadn't been told in advance, we wouldn't have known that the path was down," says Nicoletti. "All data rerouted to the other path in milliseconds."
Cisco Professional Services
To help it install and configure the data backup solution, Federated interviewed various consultants and providers. Ultimately, the company selected Cisco Systems® Professional Services because it wanted one company to be responsible from start to finish. According to Nicoletti, this was a very important project for Federated. "I wanted to know that, if there were any problems, there wouldn't be any finger pointing. Also, since we were new to optical, it was extremely valuable to have Cisco specialists providing my team with guidance and tips to help us get the operation off the ground."
Domachowski believes that what ultimately contributed to the success of the project was the commitment of EMC, Cisco, and DQE Communications. At the start of the project, he pulled together team members from each of the vendors seeing an opportunity to make a niche in this area and to potentially make history for Federated. "But I needed you to put a stake in the ground and make this happen," he says. And that is exactly what happened. "Cisco, EMC and DQE stepped up to the table and saw this all the way through to success. And the results have been tremendous for Federated."
Figure 1
Federated Investor's Network Diagram
References
Product Information
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Cisco ONS 15500 Series
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/optical/ps2011/index.html
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http://www.cisco.com/public/CNIC_Guest/opticalFlash/index.html
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http://www.emc.com/horizontal/interoperability/index.jsp
News Releases
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http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/global/asiapac/news/2003/pr_12-17.html
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http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/prod_031203b.html
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http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/prod_031203d.html
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(26/Jun/2003)http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/prod_062603.html
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http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/prod_100903b.html
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Posted: Thu Apr 13 09:44:31 PDT 2006
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