by Lawrance Binda

Lehman Brothers has gained a worldwide reputation for making smart decisions for its clients’ businesses since its founding in 1850.

Since becoming a public company in 1994, Lehman Brothers has experienced tremendous growth from both a client and a business standpoint. The firm broadened its equity, fixed income, investment banking and private equity capabilities considerably, further expanding them internationally. The growing need for creative financial solutions benefited Lehman Brothers—which now attracted many new clients—while enhancing and developing its existing client relationships.

Growth comes at a cost. From an information systems perspective, new employees mean new users on the network. These users require unfettered access to data and applications. This scenario certainly rang true for Lehman.

The company has developed a variety of sophisticated applications, including mission-critical trading, market data, customer relationship management and e-commerce applications. Increasingly, video has become important to the company, which hosts real-time, on-demand and scheduled Webcasts for its employees and clients.

What did this all mean to Lehman? Simply put, the company required greater bandwidth among its offices in the New York metropolitan area. Most immediately, it needed to increase bandwidth between two data centers: one in the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan and the other just across the Hudson River in Jersey City, N.J.

Lehman was especially concerned that network volume and bandwidth demands would slow application and data access for its Manhattan-based trading and investment banking employees, whose applications were housed primarily in a mainframe and on a host of servers in the New Jersey data center. The company, though, wanted to ensure that point-to-point traffic was not compromised when traveling in either direction.

The solution proved to be fairly intuitive. Lehman Brothers already had a significant installation of dark fiber, which it leases from fiber providers. The company was reluctant to augment this investment, however, as dark fiber tends to be expensive and requires long lead times to install and deploy. Because fiber is in great demand—making it a scarce commodity in and around New York City—Lehman vowed to make the most of its current fiber plant.

Within these requirements, Lehman found what it believed to be a perfect solution: dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. This fiber-optic transmission technique employs light wavelengths to transmit. Specifically, Lehman turned to the Cisco Metro 1500, which easily met its functionality requirements. Moreover, the product was simple to configure and provided compatibility, not only with its existing Cisco-based internetworking environment but also with the other optical equipment in the data centers. In May, Lehman deployed several Metro 1500 multiplexers, each of which can support as many as 32 wavelengths (channels) of protocol per fiber strand.

The DWDM solution allowed Lehman to meet its principal requirements. First, it permitted the company to leverage its existing investment in dark fiber. By holding multiple wavelengths per fiber strand, DWDM minimized the need to lease more dark fiber. Also, the company did not have to wait for new fiber to be provisioned and installed. Thus, the DWDM solution provided a double bonus. It proved to be highly cost effective, while radically speeding the deployment of multiple Gigabit Ethernet pipes between the two data centers.

Secondly, DWDM gave Lehman a flexible solution. Now Lehman maximizes scarce fiber resources by supporting more wavelengths per fiber strand. The company can initiate the new Gigabit Ethernet channels by simply inserting hot-swappable interface cards into the DWDM equipment with no effect on the data, allowing new services to be turned on quickly.

DWDM most importantly, provided the extra bandwidth that Lehman needed in order to continue to fully support its business growth. Network users received a boost in speed when the Gigabit Ethernet backbone recently went live. Lehman knows that it now can easily add users, while providing them with the bandwidth they require to do their jobs. In fact, the company plans soon to boost its deployment of the Metro 1500 by adding more boxes.

Into the future, Lehman will be able to roll out applications that require greater and greater bandwidth.

Binda is a freelance writer based in Washington.

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