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Nortel Lights Up Storage Networks: Page 2 of 4

This awoke Nortel’s enthusiasm for the market, according to Peter Evans, VP of marketing, metro optical and optical Ethernet at Nortel. “We are just starting to take the covers off our strategy, which is a play for bundled services,” he says.

The first of these is a deal with EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). About a month ago the two firms signed a sales, marketing, testing, and validation agreement and demonstrated the early stages of some integration work between their products at Supercomm 2001. (see Nortel, EMC to Demo SAN Solution)

“We showed a reasonable degree of interoperability” in Nortel’s booth, says Bill Nelson, VP of content and info center markets at EMC. The company demonstrated EMC’s Symmetrix enterprise storage system and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software running with Nortel’s Optera Smart Agent and Optera metro platform to establish optical connections on demand and replicate content across a wide-area network.

”Nortel has the dominant share of the optical market, which is where we see EMC’s technology coming into play for wide-area storage networking,” says Nelson. “If we can optically link EMC’s storage systems, it offers managed service providers another service to sell and large enterprises a way to connect their storage over private lines.”

The Optera DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) gear is bit-rate and protocol independent, meaning it can handle all the current storage protocols, including Fibre Channel and, from the IBM mainframe world, Escon and Ficon.