Greeting all, Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Kenneth
I evaluated several campus PON project on both vendor/provider and customer sides over the last 5 years. PON was designed as a last-mile technology for _operators_ to cover huge areas and save on OPEX - that's the usual vendor's mantra. GigE usually takes two fibers to deliver; GigE aggregation requires an Ethernet switch you need to power and maintain - "many points of failure" argument. PON only takes one fiber, splitting a PON signal is done by a cheap passive optical splitter which, once installed, lasts forever. Correct cost comparison between PON and Ethernet is pretty difficult. First, the cost of the actual network _equipment_ (switches, routers etc.) for an Access network (tens of thousands of subscribers) is nothing compared to the civil works - trenching, cabling, permits etc. Second, CPE cost is the most sensitive on that scale. $5 cheaper CPE saves more money than a $50k cheaper OLT. Without scale benefits and (assumed) OpEx reduction, PON projects are usually significantly more expensive. Now, to the projects. I have never heard of seen PON on a DC level. As for the campus, none of the projects took off, and here is why: - PON equipment is proprietary. An OLT (PON hub) from vendor X works only with ONTs from the same vendor. Every other vendor claims there is "some interop" but none was able to do demonstrate. - PON infrastructure - a passive fiber tree - is a) proprietary b) not flexible. You can make any physical topology of your usual p2p fiber segments but a tree is always a tree; plus PON usually requires green APC (angle polished) connectors. - PON US/DS bandwidth allocation is asymmetric. Training, maintenance and support are important, too. Ethernet is ubiquitous, PON engineers are a bit harder to find. Proprietary nature of the product implies that a Huawei PON would look and feel somewhat different than, say, Calix PON hence the knowledge is more vendor-specific. Also, nobody likes vendor lock. If an Access Ethernet switch fails, you can - potentially - replace it with another fairly easily. PON ONT of different vendors may all come from the same OEM like Cambridge but the firmware is different. What did I miss?... Ah, the usual cabling There is a more sophisticated WDM-PON. Ericsson and Teradata had it in development, Infinera offers it as iAccess product - but I haven't tried that yet. Overall, it really depends on a project (getting all the MTBF data and calculating the failure cost was quite a task) but I personally can't see any PON benefits over Ethernet for either campus or DC even in the midterm.
From my personal experience, flexibility with cables plus cheap CWDM filters and colored optics can do magic on the campus level.
Stas On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 10:44 AM, Kenneth McRae <kenneth.mcrae@me.com> wrote:
Greeting all,
Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kenneth
In a message written on Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 03:22:20PM -0600, Stas Bilder wrote:
Now, to the projects. I have never heard of seen PON on a DC level.
A friend of mine told me of a fascinating in-data center PON solution. He had a customer that needed high speed multicast fan-out. They chose to use a 10G/1G PON solution, a single source node sending 10G PON with a 1G backchannel, 100% of the traffic was multicast. It could be passively split in DC up to 128:1 with zero "packet loss", good luck finding an Ethernet switch which can take in 10G of multicast in and turn it into 1280G of multicast out without dropping a frame. It was all done entirely inside of a single data center. Since then I've mentioned the trick to several other folks I know who need high speed multicast/broadcast replication. In the DC distance is rarely an issue, so the solution degenerates to special SFP's and a splitter, which is pretty dang simple. However, this is clearly a corner case, and I agree with your assessment overall. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
That's a genious idead On Jan 23, 2017 11:17 AM, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
In a message written on Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 03:22:20PM -0600, Stas Bilder wrote:
Now, to the projects. I have never heard of seen PON on a DC level.
A friend of mine told me of a fascinating in-data center PON solution.
He had a customer that needed high speed multicast fan-out. They chose to use a 10G/1G PON solution, a single source node sending 10G PON with a 1G backchannel, 100% of the traffic was multicast. It could be passively split in DC up to 128:1 with zero "packet loss", good luck finding an Ethernet switch which can take in 10G of multicast in and turn it into 1280G of multicast out without dropping a frame. It was all done entirely inside of a single data center.
Since then I've mentioned the trick to several other folks I know who need high speed multicast/broadcast replication. In the DC distance is rarely an issue, so the solution degenerates to special SFP's and a splitter, which is pretty dang simple.
However, this is clearly a corner case, and I agree with your assessment overall.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Greeting all,
Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated. The datacenter tor / host evironments I'm exposed to generally consider 10Gb/s or Nx10 to be the performance floor not the ceiling. To my
On 1/21/17 8:44 AM, Kenneth McRae wrote: thinking 100gig lr4 results in a substantial reduction in fiber/optic/port count which will in the long more than offset the increased cost something that didn't really happen with 40gig.
Thanks,
Kenneth
Greeting all,
Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated. The datacenter tor / host evironments I'm exposed to generally consider 10Gb/s or Nx10 to be the performance floor not the ceiling. To my
Conversely, many places still can't even handle a full table. ;-) ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "joel jaeggli" <joelja@bogus.com> To: "Kenneth McRae" <kenneth.mcrae@me.com>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2017 3:31:18 PM Subject: Re: Passive Optical Network (PON) On 1/21/17 8:44 AM, Kenneth McRae wrote: thinking 100gig lr4 results in a substantial reduction in fiber/optic/port count which will in the long more than offset the increased cost something that didn't really happen with 40gig.
Thanks,
Kenneth
I think it's really depends on your use case. If you know your TOR switches are doing 1-2 gigs at all times PON would be quite expensive to keep up with this type of usage. If your talking distribution/access out to cameras ect it would work. We run gpon across our entire access network 99% of the time it's fine once in awhile you'll get that one user that is killing the pon port and will move them to an active ethernet port. Now when NG-PON2 starts to hit the market, now you're talking about something that could be used in the data center with it's capabilities to do 4X 10G PON bonding. Note this is not going to be cheap but doable. Carlos Alcantar Race Communications / Race Team Member 1325 Howard Ave. #604, Burlingame, CA. 94010 Phone: +1 415 376 3314 / carlos@race.com<mailto:carlos@race.com> / http://www.race.com<http://www.race.com/> ________________________________ From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Kenneth McRae <kenneth.mcrae@me.com> Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2017 8:44:02 AM To: NANOG Subject: Passive Optical Network (PON) Greeting all, Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Kenneth
Hi, using in rural area, it works. Much cheaper than ETTH. On 21.01.17 18:44, Kenneth McRae wrote:
Greeting all,
Is anyone out there using PON in a campus or facility environment? I am talking to a few vendors who are pushing PON as a replacement for edge switching on the campus and in some cases, ToR switch in the DC. Opinions on this technology would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kenneth
participants (8)
-
Carlos Alcantar -
joel jaeggli -
Josh Reynolds -
Kenneth McRae -
Leo Bicknell -
Max Tulyev -
Mike Hammett -
Stas Bilder