HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

Table 83 WDM system architectures
DescriptionSystem architecture
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Passive (optical transmission protocol)
• Transparent to transmission protocol and data-rate independent
• Establishes open interfaces that provide flexibility to use Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH,
ATM, Frame Relay, and other protocols over the same fiber
• Passes the optical signal without any form of signal conditioning such as amplification
or attenuation
Active signal amplification
• Includes line amplifiers and attenuators that connect to other devices through fiber
optic links
• Boosts the signals that are transmitted to and received from peripheral network devices
• Using hardware and/or software control loops, monitors power levels to ensure that
the operation does not exceed the hardware's power budgets
Active protocol handling
• Offers protocol-specific capabilities for Fibre Channel, enabling digital TDM and
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optical multiplexing to support multiple channels on each wavelength
• Provides network monitoring, digital retiming (to reduce timing jitter), link integrity
monitoring, and distance buffering
• May require additional and potentially costly transmission hardware when deployed
in meshed networks
NOTE: HP Continuous Access products require in-order delivery of data replication Fibre
Channel frames. Architectures, products, or protocols that do not guarantee in-order
delivery are not supported.
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Active protocol handling and passive protocol handling require different switch port settings.
Characteristics
To help carriers realize the full potential of WDM, HP-supported WDM systems have the following
characteristics:
• Use the full capacity of the existing dark fiber
• Offer component reliability, 24x7 availability, and expandability
• Provide optical signal amplification and attenuation to increase the transmitted/received
signal-to-noise ratio
• Provide signal conditioning (the retiming and reshaping of the optical data-carrying signal)
for optimization of the bit error rate
• Offer channel add/drop capability (the ability to change the number of data channels by
adding or dropping optical wavelengths on any network node)
• Allow compensation of power levels to facilitate adding or dropping channels
• Provide upgradable channel capacity and/or bit rate
• Allow interoperability through standards-compliant interfaces such as Fibre Channel, SONET,
and ATM
• Convert wavelengths at each interface channel before multiplexing with other channels for
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transmission
HP coarse wave division multiplexing
HP offers CWDM, which is similar to DWDM but is less expensive, less expandable (maximum of
eight channels), and covers a shorter distance (up to a maximum of 100 km using the 1 Gb/s or
2 Gb/s CWDM SFP transceivers, and a maximum of 40 km using the 4 Gb/s CWDM SFP
transceivers).
CWDM allows up to eight 1 Gb/s, 2 Gb/s, or 4 Gb/s channels (or wavelengths) to share a single
fiber pair. Each channel uses a different color or wavelength CWDM SFP transceiver. The channels
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