Ekinops Lands Euro Deals

PARIS -- Infracom, a leading Italian telecom and data service provider, has selected optical transport equipment from Ekinops to further increase the capacity of its metro and access networks. The Ekinops 360 transport system allows service providers to optimize the aggregation and transport of a broad range of service types and rates. This capability allows Infracom to provide additional service offerings to its end customers while optimizing the bandwidth utilization of its core network.

Infracom, which provides services to large enterprises and service providers and which is constantly investing to improve the performance and the reliability of its infrastructures and assets, is using the Ekinops 360 platform to achieve more efficient and cost-effective service delivery. The Ekinops 360 transport system provides CWDM and DWDM (coarse and dense wave division multiplexing) capability in a single platform, allowing Infracom to bring an even wider variety of services, including Ethernet and Fibre Channel, to its customers.

Infracom is based in Verona, and has branches throughout Italy, including Milan, Florence, Imola, and Rome. The provider offers an extensive range of communications, networking, and ICT services, including managed and outsourced services, to companies in numerous industries, from banking and insurance to public administration, health care, telecom, and media. Its 9,000-kilometer fiber-optic backbone network connects major cities throughout Italy.

"We are committed to constantly upgrading our infrastructures in order to provide better and more efficient services to our customers. We were looking for a more robust and scalable metro and access solution and we found that in the Ekinops 360," said Roberto Grazzini, CIO, Network and DataCenters, for Infracom. "It is a very optimized solution that allows us to enlarge our offering to enterprises and service providers. Moreover, the responsiveness and support from Ekinops has been excellent."

To manage its network, Infracom is using the Ekinops MPSN (Multi-Protocol and Service Network management software) which provides a single platform for management of all service types and rates delivered by the Ekinops 360. The MPSN is both a network and service layer management application, simplifying network monitoring and diagnostics by correlating key network information to services in the network. It enables easy identification of affected services and customers when failures or faults occur and allows quick fault isolation in such instances.

"The breadth of service types and capabilities offered by the Ekinops 360 allows service providers like Infracom to stay ahead of their competition," said Rob Adams, vice president of marketing for Ekinops. "The Ekinops 360 is designed to allow companies to grow each segment of their network very easily, as customer demand evolves. It is easy to install and configure, and is proving a very cost-effective solution for Infracom."

The Ekinops 360 is Ekinops' flagship next-generation optical transport platform, providing DWDM and CWDM on a single platform for metro, regional, and long-haul applications. It handles service rates from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps. It also offers a very broad portfolio of services including SONET/SDH, Fibre Channel, FICON, Video, Ethernet, and Infiniband.

At the heart of the Ekinops 360 system is the T-Chip, which uniquely concentrates the system’s transport intelligence into a highly compact and efficient design. It can be programmed quickly for virtually any type of functionality and enables Ekinops to deliver new features and protocol support well ahead of standard industry chip sets. The unparalleled capabilities of the T-Chip yield reduction in cost, footprint, and ongoing power consumption, while also reducing delivery times to customers.

In a separate release:

PARIS -- Afone, a French-based provider of telecom services to businesses, has deployed equipment from Ekinops, a leading supplier of next-generation optical transport equipment for service providers, to interconnect its data centers and enhance its delivery of multiprotocol data services.

Afone focuses on telecom, payment, and security services for enterprises and retail businesses, and also functions as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) for enterprises and residential customers. It turned to Ekinops for a solution that would provide flexible, cost-effective, and reliable data center interconnection transporting SDH, Gigabit Ethernet, and Fibre Channel protocols.

The Ekinops 360 transport platform, with its T-Chip (Transport on a Chip) technology, allows Afone to transport multiple protocols very efficiently, maximizing the use of fiber infrastructure.

The Ekinops 360 provides industry-leading economic efficiencies unmatched by other transport solutions in the market. In addition, the Ekinops 360 provides for a level of reliability far exceeding similar solutions.

“Ekinops is the company best suited to meet our needs. The Ekinops 360 gives us the flexibility we need to aggregate different protocols, it is economical and has the highest reliability,” said Guillaume Rousseau, head of engineering at Afone. “Support is very important to us and Ekinops promised and delivers superior support.”

“Today, the increasing migration to cloud-based services has elevated data centers to paramount importance for service providers such as Afone,” said Rob Adams, vice president of marketing for Ekinops. “The competitive cloud computing market requires moving massive volumes of data among these centers, with the utmost reliability and affordability.

Ekinops SA