By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM has announced a new high-speed, high-bandwidth communications multiplexer that enables companies to set up geographically dispersed data centers with much fewer fiber optic lines than has previously been possible.
The new IBM 2029 Fiber Saver can support up to 64 channels, each running at 1.25GB/sec across two fiber optic pairs for a total of 80GB/sec of bandwidth. The previous IBM communication box, the 9729, allowed special versions of IBM’s Parallel Sysplex S/390 clustering software to work across single fiber optic links with a mere 1.05GB/sec of bandwidth. While customers could certainly add more pipes under the old scenario, at $150 to $300 per month per mile per fiber, having hundreds of fiber optic rings connecting data centers can quickly add up.
The Fiber Saver is the result of a joint development project between IBM and Nortel Networks’ OPTera Solutions optical networking division. IBM says it is initially targeting big banks and financial institutions in San Francisco, New York, Dallas and major European cities because these are the spots where primary and secondary data centers are typically located within campus or metro distances of each other. Over time, IBM expects companies in the distribution, manufacturing and retailing sectors to show interest too. IBM and Nortel have a few hundred big banks to peddle the technology to first, but IBM envisions that several thousand of its mainframe customers will eventually use the Fiber Saver.
IBM says it developed the equipment to meet the growing demand for mirrored data centers that can recover from disasters or take over for planned outages. In an actual test at a customer site, the Fiber Saver allowed a mainframe customer to reduce its recovery window from a simulated disaster from 12 hours to 22 minutes. In addition, the recovery showed no loss of data because there was no lag between what the primary machine had stored on its disks and what the secondary machine had.
The 2029 is supported on S/390 mainframes running either the older MVS or OS/390 operating system and can be hooked up to any generation of S/390 CMOS mainframe or older 9021 bipolar machines. It supports all the major networking protocols, including Escon, Ficon (early 2000), ISC, ETR, FDDI, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, OC-3 ATM and OC-12 ATM. Used in conjunction with the S/390’s GDPS feature, it can support data centers that are 25 miles (40km) apart. Moreover, because the Fiber Saver supports standard networking protocols, customers can use it to attach remote Unix or NT servers as well; all they have to do is plug a NIC into their servers and attach that to the 2029 and they are good to go. The 2029 Fiber Saver will be available for a limited number of customers in December 20, with general availability by February 25, 2000.
