CNT Goes Cheap-Sea Diving

CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT) has teamed with service provider Hibernia Atlantic to offer transatlantic fiber optic connectivity for data replication, at what the companies claim is 80 percent less than the typical cost of such services (see CNT Takes Storage Across the Pond).

Hibernia Atlantic is using the undersea cable system deployed by 360networks Inc., which filed for bankruptcy in June 2001. Subsequently, 360networks sold its transatlantic system -- which cost about $770 million to build -- to Columbia Ventures Corp., the holding company of Hibernia Atlantic, in Canadian bankruptcy court proceedings for $18 million.

That pennies-on-the-dollar fire sale has enabled CNT and Dublin-based Hibernia Atlantic to offer a 155-Mbit/s circuit for roughly $10,000 per month, compared with as much as five times that with existing services, the companies say.

"It sounds incredible, but it does sound like it could be for real," says Julian Rawle, senior market analyst at Pioneer Consulting LLC. "They can afford to price very aggressively... We've seen a lot of these cable systems go bankrupt, but this is the first time I've seen anyone leveraging the cost advantage to potentially undercut market pricing."

CNT, which sells storage networking hardware and consulting services, has yet to sign up any customers for the service. But Gail Greener, VP of marketing at CNT, expects the relatively low pricing to catch the attention of companies that want to replicate data between the U.K. and the U.S. for business continuity reasons, but couldn't afford it before. "Now you can save a significant amount of money on these solutions," she says.The Hibernia Atlantic system is a four-fiber-pair Sonet/SDH ring using DWDM to provide a total available system capacity of 1.92 Tbit/s, with around 150 Gbit/s of bandwidth lit. It lands on the North American side in Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia; on the European side its drops are in Dublin and Southport, U.K.

This week, the companies staged a demo of a 60-GByte Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange email server, with 2,000 open email user mailboxes, being mirrored between data centers in Dublin and Lynn, Mass., over a 622-Mbit/s link on the Hibernia Atlantic system. They then simulated a complete server and disk outage in Dublin, and claim they were able to recover the Exchange server in just 11 seconds.

"That's not acceptable for financial-trading applications, but it's fine for most everything else," says Ed Walsh, VP of marketing and business development at CNT.

The demo used CNT's UltraNet storage router running Fibre Channel over Sonet, connected to an EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix DMX800. The data was mirrored using EMC's Symmetrix Replication Data Facility (SRDF), a disk-to-disk replication technology.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch