OVH, one of the world’s largest hosting providers, has announced plans to enhance and expand its “high-speed” global network with Cisco optical technology – to enable greater capacity for cloud and hosted services between its data centers.
With over one million customers and 7.4 Tbps of bandwidth across 17 countries and 32 global peering points, OVH offers an extensive portfolio of cloud, hosting, and web services, including one of the world’s most extensive networks of gaming servers. The company has experienced 30% cloud growth since 2011. It is now executing on plans to expand in North America, with the construction of two new data centers in the U.S. underway.
Interconnecting OVH’s data centers is an integral part of the company’s network expansion. It requires a highly resilient, scalable platform capable of both meeting the demands of today, and in the future across existing long-distance fiber infrastructure.
Central to OVH’s expansion plans is the Cisco NCS 2000 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing platform (DWDM). The NCS 2000 would maximize capacity of fiber optic trunks at a rate of 200 Gbps, and long-haul distances. Started in 2015, the deployment of this technology on the OVH network has been performed successfully on 100+ sites. Expansion is currently ongoing on the Toronto-Beauharnois and Milan-Strasbourg links.
OVH is one of the first carriers in the world to deploy 200 Gbps 16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology for each wavelength, maximizing the capacity of all inter-data center trunks. Using a 16 QAM scheme doubles the capacity of the DWDM links without sacrificing the distance reach, significantly reducing costs by eliminating half the optical components required.
“OVH continues to be at the cutting edge of networking,” said Octave Klaba, founder and CTO of OVH. “By leveraging our own data center technology for our servers and our IP and optical networks from Cisco, we’re able to deliver a faster, more secure, and more scalable solution for our customers. OVH is ready to be the leader in Digital as a Service in a way that no other cloud hosting company can achieve.”
