The data centre interconnect technology will be used to connect multi-tenant data centres connected by the West African Cable System.
TENET operates multiple peering and transit links across Europe and Africa plus gateways under contract to the UbuntuNet Alliance. It also offers direct connections to the European research and education network GEANT.
“We are impressed with the operational simplicity of the DarkStar equipment,” says Len Lotz, Executive Officer – Technology and Operations for TENET. “After experimenting with XKL’s online demonstration systems, provisioning and bringing up service was quite easy. This was the first of several projects and we’ve been impressed with XKL’s products and engagement.”
The transponder systems picked by TENET grow to 36x10G in a 1RU package, and establish the connection between multi-tenant data centres. The inclusion of an amplified mux/demux with optical switch protection, was driven by TENET’s desire to easily scale its transport capacity as demand increases as well as provide optical path protection between locations in the event of a fibre break, XKL said.
The system means TENET can add new optical transport systems as needed without disrupting services.
“TENET was looking for a comprehensive data centre interconnect solution that facilitates success-based expansion,” said Chad Lamb, chief systems architect for XKL.
“Linking strategic data centre locations is an increasing trend and XKL has a portfolio of products to support this use case. It’s hard to predict the growth level of traffic that will be needed between sites. The XKL solution provides future expansion capability without the costs typically seen with optical transport solutions.”
