Next Connex

Challenge

The UK has one of the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing data centre industries. Next Connex founded in 2010, has positioned itself to meet the market demand of data centre customers for reliable, scalable, and flexible fibre connections.

In June 2013, Next Connex, along with partner Magdalene started building a new network to provide 8TB of connectivity across Southern England as well as Manchester, and Leeds. Next Connex chose Huawei Enterprise to provide the optical networking equipment to run this network. The network runs on dark fibre provided by Geo. Next Connex’s partner for this project has been UK-based network solutions integrator, operational management and maintenance provider Magdalene, which has been a long-standing partner for Huawei in the UK telecom market.

A key challenge was the find a solution provider that would allow them to provide the network in a highly flexible and scalable way. Working closely with Magdalene, it was clear that a vendor with Optical Transport Technology (OTN) switching capabilities was needed to deliver these services. OTN allows Next Connex to quickly deliver circuits at speeds up to 100Gb (including 100Mb, 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb), avoiding additional equipment requirements or less efficient use of fibre.

Solution

Next Connex and Magdalene identified certain key requirements for the fibre network and set out to identify vendors who could meet these requirements.

Following an in-depth procurement process where some of the leading vendors of Transmission equipment in the Metro/Enterprise space were evaluated, Next Connex decided that the Huawei OSN1800V proposal provided in partnership by Huawei with Magdalene represented the best option.

Value

For Next Connex, the most important benefit of choosing Huawei was the flexibility and scalability of Huawei’s switched OTN solution, including:

• The ability to control and manage customer provisions at service level: Next Connex can manage individual circuits down to 100Mb. Therefore, rather than only offering wavelengths, individual circuits can be provisioned and fully managed for customers.
• The network is designed to support 40 x 100Gb wavelengths, therefore the ability to provide switched OTN was a must to ensure this capacity can be efficiently allocated. With Huawei’s OSN1800 OTN solution, Next Connex can initially share 10Gb wavelengths among customers (and in the future at 40Gb/100Gb).
• Ease of Management: New circuits or nodes can be seamlessly added to the network very quickly.

According to Mark Fitchew of Next Connex: “With the Huawei solution, we can add a circuit or increase bandwidth in a very short amount of time, almost the same day. The only bottleneck will be the cross connect service in the data centre.” Huawei’s commitment to the UK market and to local support was critical as was the need to stay within a tight budget for equipment, support and maintenance. Huawei and Magdalene were able to meet these combined challenges, ensuring that Next Connex can offer competitively priced and reliable services.