Global Crossing has announced it has added the Global Crossing EtherSphere family of services to the company’s Ethernet WAN transport offers. The new globally available services are EtherSphere Multipoint-to-Multipoint, EtherSphere Point-to-Multipoint and EtherSphere Point-to-Point solutions. They are available today as enterprise and wholesale offers in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom (UK), Asia, and Latin America.
Previously available in the UK as a metropolitan Ethernet offer, the expanded EtherSphere Ethernet WAN transport family now offers customers ubiquitous, global Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS). EtherSphere solutions use mature, familiar Ethernet technology for wide area transport of enterprise services, such as file sharing, email, document management, enterprise resource planning, and real-time collaboration. The technology is reliable, can easily accommodate additional bandwidth in small increments, offers cost efficiencies traditionally associated with Ethernet, and interworks with other Global Crossing WAN solutions, such as Global Crossing IP Virtual Private Networks. The service is provided over Global Crossing’s dedicated Multi Protocol Label Switching backbone network to ensure high-speed, reliable, region-to-region connectivity and access to the Internet.
"Global Crossing’s EtherSphere Ethernet wide area transport solutions give enterprise IT managers a way to globally interconnect their locations in key regions around the world,” said Dave Carey, Global Crossing’s chief marketing officer. “Its genuine, global ubiquity sets our offer apart from the rest of the industry.
“Clearly, Ethernet is rapidly becoming the primary communications technology for global IT organizations,” added Carey. “Ethernet is a proven LAN technology for businesses today. And with next-generation enterprise applications, such as disaster recovery, storage, and packet voice and video, driving steep increases in bandwidth demand, enterprise IT managers know that data services over legacy technologies simply do not get the job done. Traditional data services are expensive to scale, operationally complex, and can be painfully slow to upgrade.”
"With the launch of EtherSphere, Global Crossing has placed itself in a competitive position for meeting growing demand in the market for international any-to-any Layer 2 Carrier Ethernet services,” stated Joel Stradling, senior analyst at Current Analysis. “The operator is hitting the market with a well-designed Ethernet VPLS offer that is enhanced with several features, such as support for up to six CoS, and flexible pricing and bandwidths. The richness in capability combined with strong existing global MPLS reach and know-how make the Global Crossing EtherSphere product range a strong proposition in the market."
According to Ian Redpath, Principal Analyst, Ovum, the global Ethernet VPLS market is projected to increase from $1.3 billion in 2008 to $8.4 billion in 2014, which translates into an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate of 37 percent.
VPLS is an ideal technology for enterprises that need to connect data centers or remote locations. It is particularly attractive to the healthcare, financial, government, and technology industries interested in deploying multi-site, multi-regional WANs. It is a private Ethernet (Layer 2) network constructed over a “packet-based” infrastructure that has the ability to span several networks. Global Crossing’s VPLS supports a range of connectivity options, including multipoint-to-multipoint, point-to-multipoint, and point-to-point.
Global Crossing’s EtherSphere services support six classes of service that enable users to prioritize traffic to maximize bandwidth use and efficiency. The service also offers a highly desirable usage-based billing component that helps enterprises more easily accommodate irregular and unpredictable bandwidth use, as well as more effectively manage their network costs. This is especially beneficial for backup and disaster recovery implementations.