Cisco Adds DWDM Replication in Hong Kong

HONG KONG -- Cisco Systems (HK) (Nasdaq:CSCO- News) Limited today announced that CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, one of Asia's top brokerage, investment banking, and private equity houses, has implemented a new network infrastructure based on dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology that boosts bandwidth 200-fold and provides far greater reliability and resilience across its trading and core operations. Prior to deploying the new Cisco® optical technology at CLSA's Hong Kong headquarters, any network interruptions in the 24,000-square-foot(2,232-square-meters) dealer-room would potentially cost millions of dollars in revenue.

The new network, based on the Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM switch, integrates data networking and storage replication over an intelligent metro optical network. The significant upgrade brings greater access, stability and speed to CLSA's extensive financial research database, brokerage transactions, settlement systems and other internal functions. The network also supports dealer-room operations across 12 other cities in the region, with Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo and Mumbai ranking highest in turnover.

Cisco's DWDM technology offered CLSA a way to increase network throughput, data replication and resiliency in a cost-effective manner. With 50 percent of its transactions handled electronically representing tens of millions of dollars, CLSA required greater availability and reduced occurrences of network outages. The Cisco networking solution increased network resiliency, allowing CLSA to maintain an acceptable fault tolerance for its mission-critical transaction systems while still maintaining low costs.

The new network, implemented jointly with Hutchison Global Communications and Cisco channel partner Macroview, also involved the upgrading of CLSA's DS-3 lines to high-speed Fast Ethernet connections, and upgrading of the broker's storage area network.

"Cisco and Hutchinson offered the best solution in terms of resiliency and cost savings," said Andrew Yu, head of infrastructure at CLSA. "Data replication bandwidth increased six-fold with higher resiliency and at a cost of half as much as maintaining the existing system. We now have an infrastructure capable of supporting straight-through processing of time-critical electronic transactions with sufficient load balancing to allow outlying offices to access both data centers."

Cisco Systems Inc.