A FRAMED WHITE TEE SHIRT HANGS IN Pawan Jaggi’s office at Richardson, TX-based Celion Networks, testimony to the entrepreneur’s resilience. The tee was a birthday gift to the CEO, where the first fifty employees signed messages on it. “Less than a dozen have left the organization,” says a proud Jaggi, who today is shipping out boxes for field tests—a giant step forward in the startup game.

Jaggi quit his executive job at Level 3 Communications in 2000 to start Celion Networks. A veteran in the optical fiber and network space, Jaggi located a pain point in the enteprise that was yet unresolved—scaling the WAN capabilities without doubling costs. “Typically, the cost of a leased-line approach scales directly with bandwidth because each additional line is a new purchase. Bandwidth-intensive applications such as disaster recovery to remote sites or grid computing can be strangled by leased-line bandwidth costs that grow without bound,” says Jaggi. Realizing the need for a technology that could deliver virtually unlimited bandwidth at a fixed cost, he took his business plan to Sand Hill road and started off with some $5m in 2000. Initially, the team focused on helping carriers help customers increase bandwidth capacity. Just over a year later, the technology was almost ready and the 9/11 disaster struck.

Jaggi was quick to realize that the telecom carrier class was not going to sign out checks any soon. “The strength of our technology was that it took us almost no time to tweak it to fit the enterprise class,” he says. It made sensee, especially since post-9/11 corporate laws dictated that enterprises establish disaster recovery centers at remote locations. But with this dictate came the need for scarcely-available WAN bandwidth. “In most cases, disaster recovery and backups take a slightly less precedence, as CIOs juggle resources to cater to the daily demands of business,” observes Jaggi.

Any enterprise considering a customer-owned infrastructure for data center connectivity needs more than just the right equipment for job, whether the application is data replication, or an active-active business continuance plan. Dark fiber needs to be obtained and engineered over an optimum route; the equipment needs to be installed; and the operation of the network must be provided for. In general, the network connection between two data centers will require dark fiber from multiple providers. The metro fiber into the buildings at each network endpoint will likely come from different providers. The long-haul fiber between endpoints may also require more than one provider, especially to provide optimal physically-diverse routes for network reliability and survivability.

Celion wrapped technology around these needs to build its Celion ETS network solution. An enterprise wishing to scale its WAN would simply plug in two identical Celion ETS boxes at either points of datasource. A series of ILA (amplifiers) boxes act as amplifiers. Increase in bandwidth would be achieved by simply plugging in linecards at a slightly incremental price. “In less than five minutes, the system is up and running, and we have built in automation sufficient enough to dispense with any maintenance protocols,” says Jaggi. “And what’s more, we have the patented single fiber in place.” Single Fiber Surprise
Optical transport systems commonly use two parallel fibers to transmit data between two terminals A and Z. One fiber transports data from A to Z, and the other fiber transports data from Z to A, providing a maximum bi-directional capacity of up to 400 Gb/s or perhaps 800 Gb/s. This high capacity comes at a cost, because each direction requires dark fiber and a full set of transmission equipment including optical amplifiers, dispersion compensation modules and gain equalizers.
However, this large capacity may not be required for applications such as internal corporate networks.

If the capacity requirements can be reduced, a single fiber can be used to transmit data in both directions. This reduces both the dark fiber and the equipment costs by nearly 50 percent, as most equipment can be shared between the traffic in both directions. The first concern about a single fiber system is that signals in both directions travel over the same fiber and might interact with each other. When a signal propagates along a fiber from A to Z, the signal power is indeed being scattered by the glass molecules (“Rayleigh Scattering”) and reflected at fiber splices or connectors. Some fraction of this reflected or scattered power will be reversed in direction and will co-propagate with the Z-A traffic.

If a system is designed with the channels for either directions carried on the same set of wavelengths, the scattered power from one direction will interfere with the counter-propagating channel and will lead to severe signal distortions. In a very poorly designed system, the backscattered power could be amplified in a line amplifier and again be scattered or reflected. If the amplifier gain is then larger than the reflection loss, this could lead to an avalanche-like power surge (effectively lasing) with potential destruction of the equipment.

Celion has designed the Celion Single Fiber Solution (CSFS) to prevent all of these effects. To eliminate the signal-to-signal interaction from scattering and reflections, the forward and reverse channels travel on different wavelengths. The impact from double scattering is eliminated by introducing strong band-filtering stages throughout the system to suppress out-of-band signals that travel in the “wrong” direction by more than 60 dB (more than a factor of 1,000,000). These two provisions prevent signal distortions even in older fiber plants, where connector or splice reflections can be as large as -14 dB.

“The CSFS provides for a bi-directional capacity of 100 Gbps, compared to a capacity of 400 Gbps in the Celion CN4000 system with comparable system reach. This capacity of 100 Gbps in each direction allows for the transport of 40 OC-48 channels or 160 aggregated OC-12 channels, or 45 terabytes of data per hour. This capacity should be more than sufficient for even large enterprise networks,” says Jaggi.
Once the team cracked this, Jaggi was quick to secure the second round and got a whopping $50m, with the first reound investors showing sound confidence in the technology and Jaggi’s leadership. In less than two years, Celio has brought the ETS out of the door and is receiving keen interest at the enterprise level. “Throught out the process, we made it a point to talk with decision-makers, and map their requirements into the design,” says the CEO.

With the latest round of funding, Jaggi is expanding his sales team to knock on CIO doors. “Financial companies need easy, plug-and-play scalability to their existing bandwidth without further recurring costs. Celion offers just that,” says an industry analyst. With Sequoia and Lehman Brothers behind him, the CEO is confident that the industry would receive him, without doubting the company’s survivability. “Of course, there will be competition, but we have too many patents into the box, and will not be slung out easily,” smiles Jaggi.”There are armies of PhD’s working inside the Celion system.”

Passion and perseverance has paid off. “We hired fresh MIT graduates to work on the technology, to bring in that fresh out-of-box thinking. And along the way, the patents we have piled up is simply awesome,” says Jaggi.

How is that for some juice?