Carrier Ethernet
 | This is an incredibly simple yet immensely powerful product. It is extremely flexible and rather than make it sound complicated with lots of product names, we give it one, outline what it can do, and then work with you to build a solution for you or your customers. Whilst history has taught us to think of inter-site connectivity as expensive and complicated, it doesn’t need to be and if you have a connectivity requirement in the UK, Simwood’s Carrier Ethernet is most likely part of the solution.Imagine your office was based in a data centre and Internet access was just a patch lead away. Or, imagine your data centre was in your office, and all your other offices were in the same place; you could just connect equipment and applications with a LAN with no fuss or complication. Things would work quickly and simply. The complication saved may encourage you to segregate services into multiple virtual networks (VLANs) for performance, security or quality of service. Well, pull those sites apart but leave the cables connected and you understand our Carrier Ethernet, the only difference being it isn’t old fashioned copper joining your sites but fiber all the way for optimum stability, low-latency and performance. At one extreme you could take an Ethernet tail to your or your customer’s office, with us providing Internet access on the other end, and you have a high performance leased line replacement. Our all optical circuits are available in up to 1Gb, but typically 10-100Mb, and we frequently find they yield both a cost saving and a performance increase. In one recent case we replaced a customer’s 2Mb copper based leased line with a high performance 100Mb optical ethernet circuit and still saved them over 30%. Of course, you may not want us to provide Internet access at the other end, you might want to connect to a second site. This is no problem, you can add as many sites as you require, including data centres, and effectively end up with a high performance private ethernet cloud. We use VPLS technology which is far superior to MPLS alternatives in that it gives you a completely clean pipe which you can do whatever you like in – if you can run it on the LAN, you can run it on our Ethernet. Taking it a stage further, we mentioned how you may have multiple VLANs or QoS settings if everything was in one place. That is absolutely possible too. Each site is deployed with an EDD (Edge Demarcation Device) which extends our control and visibility to your premises; we can even see if you’ve had a power cut for example and not, as otherwise, assume the circuit is down. From your perspective this is a box with ethernet ports on it, be it one, or four. The four port device allows maximum flexibility as each port can de assigned to a specific VLAN and each VLAN has its own quality of service settings. In our simple Internet access example, you may have several tenants in one building wishing to share Internet access. No problem, take a single Carrier Ethernet circuit with a four port EDD and use one port per tenant. We can split bandwidth as you require and each tenant is completely separate from any other. This avoids the security and disruption concerns of sharing a single facility whilst also avoiding unecessary expense on seperate circuits. Similarly, in our ethernet cloud example you could have one port corresponding to a VLAN including selected other sites, and another for Internet access. As you’ll hopefully be seeing this product is extremely flexible and can enable you to achieve on the WAN, exactly what you could achieve on the LAN. Where our Carrier Ethernet solution adds most value is the way it can dovetail with our other Managed Services. It is perfectly feasible for Carrier Ethernet customers to co-locate physical equipment with Simwood, or virtualise servers and mix VLANs between multiple Carrier Ethernet sites, co-located equipment and virtualised equipment in almost any combination they wish.
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