We have several buildings and a couple data centers spread around the city and interconnected via dark fiber. It's a very simple setup - no ROADM, no real ring, no extended layer-2 or layer-3 via the optical gear.
Pretty much we just mux/demux a channel for each building so that each building sees the two data centers directly even though the fiber span may wind through a couple buildings along the way. In some cases, the distance is short enough to use colored optics in the network gear, but mostly the distances are just long enough to warrant transponder cards. All that being said, a lot of the gear is approaching end of life (support in some cases). I'm not an optical guru but I can muddle my way through with Cisco ONS and I'm aware that Ciena and Fujitsu also have similar products. We really don't have budget for a large optical refresh effort. However, we've saved some money here and there in the routing/switching arena by leveraging Arista and even Cumulus. I'm wondering if there are smaller players in the optical arena that have a good quality/price value? Again, we don't need sophisticated features... we primarily have 2-to-4 1Gb and 10Gb ports required per site, then we mux those onto a wavelength and extend it to the two data centers. Most buildings are set up the same way, each on a different wavelength so the don't even see each other... only the data centers. If you guys know of any optical gear that you can vouch for (and which costs less than a small house), we would greatly appreciate it. Thanks LFOD
