HANOVER, Md., Nov. 13 – Ciena Corporation, the network specialist, today announced that the Pacific Wave international network peering facility—which connects research and education (R&E) networks in 40 countries in the Pacific Rim and beyond—was recently upgraded with Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with WaveLogic coherent optical processors. This deployment will provide 100Gb/s networking capabilities to Pacific Wave's extensive R&E network infrastructure across the western coast of the United States, from Los Angeles to Seattle.

The 100G backbone now connecting Pacific Wave’s major peering locations will not only provide regional and national high-speed connectivity between higher education and research institutions throughout the U.S. Pacific Coast, but will also allow R&E institutions around the world to collaborate more quickly and effectively in data-intensive, international sciences such as astronomy, oceanography, high-energy physics, and genomics.

In choosing Ciena for this deployment, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) --who together operate Pacific Wave as a joint project – are ensuring that Pacific Wave is consistent with the recent Internet2 and the US Department of Energy (ESnet) 100G backbone upgrades.

Key Facts:

• Pacific Wave is a distributed international peering facility that enables R&E networks to share traffic at any of five locations in three cities: Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle. Current network participants are located throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Qatar, Singapore, South America, Taiwan, and the United States. Connectivity to Europe is further facilitated via peering with StarLight Chicago.
• The Pacific Wave peering facility’s West Coast backbone will be powered by Ciena’s coherent technology, a critical component of the company’s OPn architecture, to provide significant scale and capacity to support the increasing bandwidth requirements of large-scale e-science, distributed computing, and storage applications.
• In addition, the network supports ESnet’s On-Demand Secure Circuits and Reservation System (OSCARS) that enables the dynamic provisioning of multi-domain, high-bandwidth virtual circuits that provide bandwidth and service guarantees to support research applications and has the potential to incorporate software defined networking in the future.
• Ciena’s 6500 allows Pacific Wave’s West Coast backbone to ride on the Internet2 backbone as a fully separated “virtual wave,” capturing the benefits of a private fiber network at a fraction of the cost through managed spectrum.
• Funded through grants from the National Science Foundation to the University of New Mexico, the Pacific Wave network will also provide advanced broadband network capabilities, services, content, and applications, expanding the use of the Internet2 network in the western United States and enabling new capabilities to participants in CENIC, PNWGP, and Internet2 R&E networks.

“Now more than ever, research and education efforts require high speed networks that can quickly and reliably transfer massive amounts of data and applications over greater distances. Ciena’s coherent optical solutions provide the economical and exponential growth in bandwidth requirements required to support data-intensive, collaborative research projects so that scientists can conduct experiments, investigate, and collaborate with peers in new and innovative ways,” said Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research at Ciena.

Ciena is participating in several demonstrations at the SC Conference 2012 (SC12), in Salt Lake City, November 12-15. To learn more about the Pacific Wave network, visit CENIC and PNWGP at SC12 booth #3647.

About CENIC

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are onnected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

About Pacific Northwest Gigapop

The Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) is a not-for-profit organization whose team brought the original internet to the northwest in the 80's, and which today provides the full range of cost-effective, reliable, broadband high-performance networking, interconnection and peering, and related collaboration mechanisms, needed to help support the missions of our diverse membership, including the research, education, medical, cultural, government and leading technology organizations throughout the pacific-northwestern USA and also internationally across the Pacific Rim via Pacific Wave.

About Internet2

Internet2 is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation's leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions.

About Ciena

Ciena is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with OPn, its approach for building open next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. We routinely post recent news, financial results and other important announcements and information about Ciena on our website.

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Source: Ciena