Encrypted Wavelengths Offer High Bandwidth and High Security

By: John Shepler

With data security becoming more and more of an issue, every weak link in the IT infrastructure needs to be identified and hardened. If your network extends beyond your premises, like most every one does, those MAN and WAN connections represent a vulnerability that has to be addressed. A relatively new service does that now for very high bandwidth users. It’s called Wavelength Encryption or Encrypted Waves.

Security of Dedicated Lines
The vulnerability of your connection can vary dramatically, depending on how your packets are getting from point A to point B. Back when the connectivity standard was a point to point T1 line, you had pretty decent security. A single line consisting of 2 twisted pair was dedicated to your use only. It was “nailed up”, as they say, meaning it was as close to a hard wire between two points that you could get. Only when you discontinued service was the connection “torn down” and the resources assigned to someone else.

Fiber Optic WAN and Multi-Tenant Networks
That’s not the way it is today. Unless you own a complete dark fiber run and light it yourself, you are sharing facilities with some and probably many other users. Note that you aren’t sharing bandwidth itself if you order a dedicated line. It’s just that high bandwidth fiber, be it SONET or Carrier Ethernet, is multiplexed to transport multiple streams of data and yours is simply stripped off the stream when it is delivered to your door.

It gets even more complicated in MPLS networks. These networks are multi-tenant by nature. The operator routes your data and that of other customers on the same core network and hands yours and only yours to you at the network edge.

Then, there's the Internet...
The security issues of the Internet need hardly be mentioned. You would have a hard time building a network that is less secure. But you don’t use the Internet for anything critical, right? If you have SDN connections over Cable Broadband or 4G Cellular, you probably are using the Internet for transport without realizing it.

Making the Insecure Secure
The answer to security jitters is encryption. On public networks, these encrypted data streams are said to be going through a “tunnel”. You can do the encryption and decryption yourself, or you can have your managed service provider take care of it.

Who Needs Encrypted Waves?
When it comes to high demand, high stakes uses, like medical data within hospital groups, there is a need for very high bandwidth channels that also have high security built-in. Level 3 Communications is at the frontier of a relatively new high performance connection called encrypted waves. These are based on the same wavelengths that are generated by coarse (CWDM) or dense (DWDM) wavelength division multiplexing. Each wavelength or set of wavelengths can deliver 10 to 100 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth. The multiplexing refers to multiple wavelengths, called colors or Lambdas, traveling over the same fiber strand. While leasing an entire wavelength does improve your security, encrypting that wavelength really adds security.

It’s simple in concept. The new wrinkle is that Level 3 is providing you with the wavelength already encrypted and protocol agnostic. Send whatever you want down the channel without having to worry about the nuts and bolts of securing that data stream.

Encrypted Wave Services Available Now
Here’s what Level 3’s Encrypted Wavelength service offers. The encryption is AES-256, the gold standard. You handle key management through your separate MyLevel3 portal that has two form factor authentication access. Ethernet speeds are supported at 10, 40 and 100 Gbps. SONET / SDH 10 Gbps is supported, as is OTU 2, 2e, 3 and 4. FICON and Fiber Channel (metro only) is supported at 8, 10 and 16 Gbps SAN. Low latency routes are optionally available for the highest performance.

Do you have high bandwidth needs that also require high security? You should take a closer look at what encrypted wavelength services have to offer. You may also be interested in dark fiber solutions. See what bandwidth options are available for your business locations now.

New Data Center Networking Solutions

Data management and storage requirements for enterprise level organizations continue to increase. In addition, a majority of enterprise IT departments now replicate data between data centers. This has created a need for new and more cost effective bandwidth services, especially at 10 Gbps and above. Level 3 is addressing these needs with an enhancement of its existing data center networking solutions.

What’s different about data center connectivity compared to other business requirements? Data centers are far more concentrated than other computing resources. This is especially true for storage, a prime driver for offsite data centers in the first place. What this does is increase the need for high bandwidth connections between the concentration of storage and the concentration of users. It also influences the connectivity required.

What you need for last mile connections to an MPLS network or private lines to link business locations can usually be handled by T-Carrier, SONET/SDH or Carrier Ethernet line services. Data centers need higher bandwidth connections, but may also need special SAN protocols including Fibre Channel, Infiniband, ESCON and FICON.

SAN stands for Storage Area Networks. These are large collections of disk drives that connect directly to the application servers. SAN networks have traditionally been very localized, with the disk arrays physically near the servers. But what do you do when you need to duplicate data between data centers?

Many companies operate two or more data centers, sometimes a half-dozen or more. Some of this is due to mergers and acquisitions of formerly independent organizations with their own IT infrastructures. Much is driven by a need for disaster protection and recovery. When your business is critically dependent on its electronic data, normal backup processes aren’t adequate. You can have multiple copies of your files locked up locally and still be put out of business by a fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane or other disaster that destroys whole buildings and everything in them.

This means that you want to have copies of your critical data dispersed geographically. Establishing independent data centers in two or more cities far apart means than a disaster that takes out one center probably won’t knock out everything. There’s also an advantage to content providers in having the servers and data content located close to the customers. Latency is reduced and performance is increased due to less network congestion. A challenge is how to make sure the data is replicated exactly at all locations.

This is where long distance SAN networking comes into play. You need high levels of bandwidth but also support for SAN protocols to keep everything synchronized. FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a popular protocol for transmitting Fibre Channel frames over 10 Gbps Ethernet connections. WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing avoids having to layer protocols to connect facilities. Each wavelength in a fiber optic link can be assigned its own protocol, regardless of what is running on other wavelengths in the same beam.

Level 3 Communications has expanded its data center networking portfolio to include SAN fiber channel protocol, dark fiber and managed fiber solutions. This is in addition to dedicated bandwidth services from 1 Gbps to more than 40 Gbps, including 10 Gbps EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. They offer low latency route guarantees and an international service footprint, including a presence at key public exchange facilities.

Are you concerned with managing multiple high performance data centers? Would you like to have more options and/or better pricing for all your telecom connectivity needs? If so, get complementary consulting help and pricing and availability for high bandwidth networking services.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons