CANOBEAM DT-50
OPTICAL
BEAM TRANSCEIVER ACCOMPLISHES
AN ETHERNET RESCUE FOR ADAC LABS
There was only a parking lot separating Building One
from Building Four on the corporate campus of ADAC Laboratories
in Milpitas, CA. To Eric Caddenhead, Director of Network
Operations for ADAC, however, it may as well have been
the Bermuda Triangle: The T1 line serving as the Ethernet
link had become overburdened, dropping engineers' communications
links into the abyss with his first choice for a fix -
fiber - out of the question.
"We had a very unreliable point-to-point T1 here,
rather than dark fiber because our landlord doesn't want
fiber to go across the parking lot," says Caddenhead.
"A lot of our programmers are in Building Four, and
they were getting disconnected while working on the Oracle
database.
Plus, as we brought more production systems online with
Siebel, our back end requirements increased while our
capacity was at a standstill and unreliable."
This would be a major problem anywhere, but at ADAC,
a Philips company that stands as a world leader in nuclear
medicine and radiation therapy planning systems as well
as an emerging force in positron emission tomography (PET),
down time takes on a special sense of urgency. Fully alerted
to the problem, Caddenhead went on a search through a
maze of wireless options before finding an ideal solution
in free space optics (FSO), with the Canobeam DT-50 optical
beam transceiver from Canon.
"At first, we put in a 5.6 Mbps microwave system,
but it proved unreliable due to all the noise in the area,
and the bandwidth needs were exceeding its capacity,"
Caddenhead recalls. "So I did some shopping, comparing
solutions from Cisco and Nortel that ranged from radio
to microwave - and then I found the Canobeam."
In search of a very dependable, high-speed connection
Caddenhead found that the Canobeam's laser system exceeded
all his basic requirements by a long shot, as well as
bringing several features that he hadn't even hoped to
get. "I was looking for a hardware solution,"
Caddenhead says. "100 Mbps was the minimum requirement,
and the ability to go faster - I needed, in the future,
to be able to swap out a control card and, boom, I'm going
faster. I'm currently running 100 Mbps, but with Canobeam
I have the capacity of going up to 622 Mbps."
With it's ability to provide a secure, straight line
LAN connection at distances of up to 2Km without requiring
FCC allocation, ability to interface with multiple network
types, and easy setup, Canobeam had strength to spare
for curing Caddenhead's parking lot problem. As he
honed in on Canobeam through his month-long research process,
the FSO device also beat out the other six devices Caddenhead
had been reviewing due to two more important considerations:
Autotracking technology that maintains a steady alignment
between units, and highly convenient
monitoring capabilities.
"Earthquakes are something you have to plan for,"
the California-based Caddenhead points out. "If we
have a tremor, I don't want to have to go on the roof
to align the device. Just like any satellite dish, Canobeam
automatically aligns itself. I saw that was part of the
package, and
it's a really good feature.
"The remote monitoring is important to me as well:
I can see its performance. In terms of cost, it pays for
itself. I don't have the monthly recurring bill that I
would have with a Telco carrier, and it solves the problems
of lost connections, because the older system was constantly
dropping a communications link. It's already paid for
itself - the feeling around here is it was well worth
the money we spent on it."
Once he'd purchased the Canobeam at a cost of about $50,000,
Caddenhead called on the experience of Bay Telephone for
installation on the roof of each building. From that point
on, the Canobeam III went to work, making a difference
in ADAC's Ethernet that both he and the 50+
engineers who had been affected could appreciate immediately.
"There was not much of a learning curve," Caddenhead
confirms, "just 'Plug 'n' Play'. It was very easy.
No hard configurations - just a straightforward communications
device.
"The pipe was open, and the engineers noticed right
away, especially in terms of file transfer time and reliability.
Their SAP and Siebel applications stopped dropping communications
to the server. The DBA's also noticed their speed increases
when working with remote databases,
so they could actually do their jobs! So far we've had
rain, hot summer days, fog - all of it was no problem.
There have been no service interruptions since we started
using Canobeam."
After the purchase and installation, Caddenhead has grown
to appreciate having the established Canon name backing
up Canobeam. "Working with Canon has been great,"
he says. "When I call, I talk to a human! They were
also very helpful in locating an installation provider
for me."
For Eric Caddenhead, the Great Parking Lot Divide was
the path to an innovative hardware solution that has gone
a long way to not only restoring order on the ADAC campus,
but also improving the link and showing how to think outside
the box on connectivity. "The cost of the
Canobeam is very reasonable for the solution provided,"
he says, "and our productivity is great because now
we don't have all these disruptions.
"I didn't know the search would lead to FSO at first,
but I'm very impressed with it. It's reliable, and the
throughput is excellent. I now believe that wireless technology
should be more of a player for a telecommunications situation.
The Telco carriers are not delivering the bandwidth and
reliability that I'm looking for - especially for dealing
with landlords that won't allow you to dig up their parking
lots with pipes!"
For further information on Canon Broadcast & Communications
Products,
please call 1-800-321-4388.
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