[1st-mile-nm] Sandia’s new fiber optic network is world’s largest

[Richard Lowenberg]

February 28, 2013
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/fiber_optic/

Fiber optic network saves energy, money

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories has become a pioneer 
in large-scale passive optical networks, building the largest fiber 
optical local area network in the world.

The network pulls together 265 buildings and 13,000 computer network 
ports and brings high-speed communication to some of the labs’ most 
remote technical areas for the first time. And it will save an estimated 
$20 million over five years through energy and other savings and not 
having to buy replacement equipment. Sandia expects to reduce energy 
costs by 65 percent once the network is fully operational.

Fiber offers far more capacity, is more secure and reliable and is less 
expensive to maintain and operate than the traditional network using 
copper cables.

An optical local area network (LAN) gives people phone, data and video 
services using half-inch fiber optic cables made of 288 individual 
fibers, instead of the conventional 4-inch copper cables. Copper cables 
used to fill up underground conduits and required steel overhead racks 
of connecting cable, along with distribution rooms filled with separate 
frames for copper voice and data cables. The fiber distribution system 
uses only part of the conduit and needs only a 2- by 3-foot cable box.

“The frames go away, and the walls are bare and the tray empties,” said 
senior engineer Steve Gossage, who has spent his 36-year career at 
Sandia in advanced information and network systems engineering.

The national laboratory has always pushed for speed beyond the fastest 
transmission rate available, Gossage said. “When people were working in 
much slower data rates, kilobit-type rates at short distances, we were 
trying to get 10 times the distance and 10 times the speed,” he said.

Adopting fiber optics

Sandia began looking at fiber optics early in the technology’s 
development because of its promise of higher bandwidth — greater 
communication speed — at longer distances. The labs started converting 
from copper in the 1980s, first installing then-emerging fiber optics in 
a single building and bumping that facility to megabit speeds. “Today 
we’re way past that. We’re at 10 gigabit-type rates and looking hard at 
100,” Gossage said.

After years of planning, Sandia completed a formal network plan in late 
2008 and sought competitive bids the following year. Sandia selected 
Tellabs of Naperville, Ill., as the equipment vendor for the network, 
and Gossage and his colleagues simultaneously began to jumpstart the 
deployment of the fiber infrastructure and set up a test lab to validate 
the performance of configurations for the equipment and various network 
functions. The technology began moving to desktops in 2011, and by the 
end of 2012, Sandia had converted more than 90 percent of bulky copper 
cable to a fiber optics LAN.

Sandia, which will spend about $15 million on the project, needs superb 
computing capability for the problems it tackles as part of its support 
for the mission for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Whether it’s a materials science problem or modeling an event, we need 
a lot of data and a lot of processing capability,” Gossage said. “We 
need to be able to see it, we need to be able to view it, we need to be 
able to put teams together. This is a large laboratory, deeply stocked 
with scientists and engineers and test labs. For the analyses we get, 
the problems are not small and they’re not easy.”

Since its first experience with fiber optics, Sandia envisioned being 
able to use multiple wavelengths in a very high bandwidth single strand 
reaching the farthest tech areas. But decades ago, when Sandia began 
putting in single-mode fiber to desks and adding underground fiber 
capabilities, the technology wasn’t quite mature enough to take 
advantage of fiber optics’ inherent multiple wavelengths and speeds.

So Sandia continued to install the fiber optics cable foundation and 
waited as the technology developed, and moved quickly when commercial 
optical networks began deploying voice, data and video to large 
collections of homes and offices.

“There weren’t that many unknowns for us because we had been thinking 
about ways to do this on a large scale for quite a while,” Gossage said. 
“We had already thought through what this might mean to us, what it 
might mean to our lifecycle costs and where the investments would be, 
and we were already pretty comfortable with fiber and the technologies 
that go with it.”

Copper versus fiber optics

Buildings with conventional copper LANs have separate networks for 
phones, computers, wireless, security and so on. Fiber optics puts 
everything in a single network cable. That eliminates a large number of 
power-consuming switches and routers and makes the network simpler to 
operate and cheaper to install. Since it requires less space, energy and 
maintenance costs go down.

“As we research and deploy new technologies, our main objectives are to 
enable the labs’ mission, decrease life-cycle costs and if possible 
reduce our footprint on the environment. With the deployment of passive 
optical networks we have been able to meet and exceed all of these 
objectives,” said Sandia manager Jeremy Banks.

Where a conventional LAN serving 900 customers requires a space the 
size of three double ovens, an optical network serving 8,000 requires a 
microwave oven-sized space. Where copper cable required Sandia to 
maintain and manage 600 separate switches in the field, optical LAN 
allows it to operate a data center in one building and simple, standard 
ports to offices. Because fiber optics reaches beyond the 100-meter 
radius that once was the standard from a wiring closet to a desktop, 
remote areas such as the National Solar Thermal Test Facility have 
high-speed communications for the first time.

The only copper wire for most of Sandia today is a short connection 
from the wall to the desktop. Everything behind the wall is fiber.

Moving away from copper wasn’t easy. It required new technology for the 
core communication system and made Sandia its own network provider, 
Gossage said. He credited a central team of about 10 people across 
Sandia who worked together every day throughout 2011, plus sub-teams 
totaling about 40 people. The effort included engineering design, 
information technology, network systems, computing, facilities, security 
and people in the field pulling cable and connecting ports.

Still to come

Sandia is recycling copper as it’s replaced, which keeps tons of 
valuable material out of a landfill. The estimated $80,000 for the 
copper will offset some of the fiber optics cost.

The labs also must turn off hundreds of switches before it can fully 
realize the energy savings. That will take longer because it depends on 
such things as staffing, Gossage said.

More change could be coming. A small trial is under way for 
voice-over-fiber — putting data and voice in one system rather than the 
two Sandia uses today. Testing shows Sandia can protect voice running 
through a congested circuit — what Gossage calls “a Mother’s Day test,” 
when everyone calls at the same time. The Gigabit Passive Optical 
Network standard Sandia works with can dedicate part of the bandwidth 
and give priority to selected traffic such as voice. So calls would go 
through even with heavy competition from data.

Sandia also is working with a small number of researchers who need more 
bandwidth than they’re getting. The labs’ needs are ahead of the market 
but it’s pushing for next-generation increases in speed, Gossage said.

Communication speed improves every five to eight years. With copper, 
each improvement required replacing large, heavy bundles of jacketed 
cable to re-engineer them to perform at the new speed, he said. Fiber 
optical cable offers a bandwidth good for 25 years or more.

“We change the wavelength, we change the modulation rate, we don’t get 
back in the ceiling, we don’t get back in the customer’s office,” 
Gossage said. “So our return on investment, our capital investment, our 
operational investment, the impact on our customers — everything gets 
better.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by 
Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin 
Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear 
Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and 
Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national 
security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic 
competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes at sandia.gov , (505) 
844-6362



--------------------------------
Richard Lowenberg, Executive Dir.
1st-Mile Institute, 505-603-5200
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
www.1st-mile.com  rl at 1st-mile.com
--------------------------------