Telseon Gives Nishan a Boost

Startup Nishan Systems Inc. today announced that Telseon Inc. will use Nishans switches to offer storage services to its customers (see Telseon, Nishan Join on SAN Solution).

The deal demonstrates that Nishan’s basic concept -- extending Fibre Channel-based storage area networks (SANs) over IP-based telecom networks -- has passed muster with a carrier, Telseon.

Before Telseon took the plunge, it conducted a series of tests to make sure that Nishan’s equipment would interoperate with the gigabit Ethernet equipment in its metropolitan networks. Telseon created two SANs using Nishan’s IPS 3000 switches and then linked them together, first using a direct connection and then using part of Telseon’s network.

”We were delighted, when we tested in the labs, to find how easy [Nishan's equipment] was to set up, “ says David White, director of product marketing at Telseon. “In doing the test itself, we got very low latency performance from our network. The latency in the Telseon metro network link increased by only 1.2 percent."

The 1.2 percent additional latency cited by White is "quite reasonable, quite good, in fact," according to Dave Schaeffer, CEO of one of Telseon's competitors, Cogent Communications Inc. Cogent is offering similar services using Cisco 5200-series routers that do Escon, Ficon, and Fibre Channel conversions, Schaeffer adds.According to Randy Fardal, vice president of marketing at Nishan, the practical distance limits of these types of connections depends to a certain degree on the nature of the traffic. Traffic that is sensitive to timeouts, such as disk mirroring, can easily extend to 100 miles between nodes. Other types of traffic can extend to thousands of miles using the Nishan switches. "We have some 'secret sauce' built into the switches," said Fardal, "that allows us to extend the distances normally possible with Fibre Channel switches. So, we can connect Fibre Channel SANS that are hundreds or thousands of miles apart."

Telseon's network also provides bandwidth-provisioning tools that customers can use to temporarily increase the throughput of their links on their own. This allows users to accommodate planned peak periods of traffic without having to pay for that bandwidth during the balance of the month.

Telseon has metro networks in 20 major U.S. cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Silicon Valley, St. Louis, and Tampa.

Nishan has been shipping the IPS 3000 switch since February of this year.

For the record, Telseon and Nishan don’t share the same VCs. - Ralph Barker, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch