PRODUCT NEWS

Global Crossing Ethernet Services™ Provide Simplicity, Ease of Use and Value

Ethernet is both a prevalent and a widely understood protocol, especially in the LAN environment. It has a reputation for being both cost effective and reliable. Recent advances in fiber optic technology and switching electronics have greatly reduced bandwidth costs and made it possible and cost effective to extend Ethernet services across both metropolitan and national networks.

Using Ethernet across the WAN and MAN greatly simplifies both network design and management overhead, as well as offers far higher levels of bandwidth at much lower cost than traditional leased-line-based services.

Global Crossing's portfolio of National and Metropolitan Ethernet services is extensive and includes Global Crossing Ethersphere™, Global Crossing Etherline™ and Global Crossing Bespoke Ethernet.

Global Crossing Ethersphere™ provides point-to-multipoint and any-to-any services from 1Mbps to 1Gbps anywhere within a 25Km radius of Global Crossing Ethersphere's 100-plus national points of presence. Ideal as a transport for private Enterprise customer IP networks or as complete fabric for an ISP's national Ethernet services, Ethersphere provides true utility grade service.

Global Crossing Etherline™ provides robust, dedicated point-to-point Ethernet services, either between any two Global Crossing PoPs or between customer locations via Global Crossing PoPs. Services are available with 10,100 and Gigabit interfaces and may be scaled down below each of those speeds to meet individual customer needs. Etherline™ is typically used as either a "long line" LAN extension service between customer locations or as a PoP-to-PoP service for service providers.

Global Crossing Bespoke Ethernet is, as the name suggests, an individually designed private Ethernet service hosted on privately installed fibers between premises, or one of Global Crossing's metropolitan fiber networks, or upon national optical wavelengths, or on any combination of the three. Ethernet/bespoke services are used by major corporate customers and service providers and accommodate the need for specific geographic coverage, technologies and service characteristics.

The benefits of this service include:

Flexibility - Customers pay for what they need and add bandwidth as their business needs grow.

Reduced Downtime - Changing the committed data rate between locations is simplified because no physical changes are needed. So, downtime is practically eliminated.

Cost Savings - Ethernet interfaces are extremely low cost and existing LAN management tools and skilled resource can be used.

Revenue Generation - WAN bottlenecks are removed enabling increased capacity to deliver new or enhanced services.

Consolidation - By removing of WAN bottlenecks, it's possible to consolidate server resources into centralized locations.

Business Continuity - Global Crossing Ethersphere™ has extremely flexible service delivery options to ensure that all locations are always connected.

Global Crossing Managed Optical Services™ Serves Enterprise Needs

Private optical networks (PrONs), virtually unlimited in capacity and totally secure, once were only affordable by the largest telecoms companies. Global Crossing has made this ultimate networking technology both affordable and practical for the larger company with multiple data centers in the United States and UK.

Global Crossing offers managed optical networking solutions for campus, metro, and wide-area data center interconnect. These services are based on a comprehensive range of optical networking technologies. Bespoke in nature and individual to each customer, they provide the performance and flexibility necessary to extend and connect distributed data center and storage environments across MANs and WANs, including mirrored (synchronous), replicated (asynchronous) environments and backup (time-delayed) sites.

These data center interconnect solutions help ensure that expensive metro and wide-area connections can be efficiently and cost-effectively shared by many applications.

Customers of Global Crossing's private managed optical networking services are able to take advantage of Global Crossing's extensive city metro networks together with its 3,500Km national optical backbone network to both defray cost and ensure resilience and integrity. Customer specific (discrete) fiber network builds are undertaken by Global Crossing's own network planning teams to ensure that optical networking customers obtain a precise match for their functional, performance, resilience and budgetary needs.

Global Crossing's portfolio of optical services is extensive. It includes network solutions for multiple sites, point-to-point, and managed fiber. Here's a more in-depth look at these capabilities.

Managed Optical Services for multiple sites networks:
Specifically designed for customers that require bulk delivery of high bandwidth transparent ESCON, FICON, LAN and SAN services between multiple sites.

Managed Optical Services for point-to-point networks:
The cost-effective solution for customers who need point-to-point delivery of transparent LAN and SAN services.

Managed Optical Services for managed fiber networks:
Construction of private network facilities in single- or dual-diverse pairs of optical fibers between two or more buildings. Fibers may be routed in dedicated or shared ducts, according to customer needs and route availability.

Business Drivers for Global Crossing Managed Optical Services™ include:

Business Continuity - Being able to continue business uninterrupted in the event of unforeseen interruption is of paramount importance. Over the past few years, the threat from natural disaster or terrorist attack has been brought to the fore. It is the larger organizations that have the most to lose in terms of money, reputation and future opportunity from failure of a critical business process that such a threat can create.

Compliance - The Sarbanes Oxley Act is compliance legislation that covers a range of governance issues for American parented firms. The act has encouraged many companies to move away from a piece-meal approach to managing data.

Never have optical networks been more critical to supporting compliance, business continuity and data protection strategies as they are today. Legislative, regulatory, competitive, customer and shareholder pressures have caused many companies to re-examine their core business processes and the technology that supports them. Best practice dictates that the distance between main processing facilities and their backup locations should be as far as is technically and operationally possible.

Global Crossing Managed Optical Services™ offer a solution.