Ciena expands involvement with U.S. Department of Energy

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Nov 18, 2005

Fermilab deployment and support for SCinet demonstration highlight growing relationship

Ciena(R) Corporation announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is deploying its ONLINE Metro(TM) Multiservice DWDM Platform at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. Ciena also announced several technology demonstrations to occur as part of the SCinet event at the SC|05 conference, including disk-to-disk replication between Fermilab and the show floor, utilizing Ciena's CN 4200(TM) FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform.

ONLINE Metro is enabling 10G wavelengths for Fermilab to connect with one of the most advanced international optical networking facilities in the world--the StarLight (Science Technology and Research Light-Illuminated Gigabit High-Performance Transit) facility on the Chicago campus of Northwestern University.

"Ciena's transport platform provides us with connection to StarLight, in turn allowing high-bandwidth connections to the world's largest research networks," said AI Thomas, an optical network specialist at Fermilab. "This increased bandwidth supports Fermilab's high energy physics research and collaboration between scientists on a global scale. Connectivity and collaboration will be especially important for U.S. and Fermilab physicists when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN begins operating next year."

By supporting dynamic provisioning of high-bandwidth connectivity, the Ciena platform enables computing-intensive research between geographically separate locations for scientific computing applications, cluster processing, and transfers of large data sets, some in excess of one terabyte. This allows for high-performance network transport with no packet loss and the lowest latency possible.

"Ciena has a wealth of experience in supplying solutions for high-bandwidth connectivity to the DOE and other government agencies," said Rob Rice, vice president and managing director of Ciena Government Solutions, Inc. "Our work with Fermilab further illustrates Ciena's specialist capabilities in providing on-demand research networking across great distances for the Research and Education community."

Ciena's ONLINE Metro Multiservice DWDM platform provides carrier-class solutions for both carrier and enterprise environments. The platform is widely used in the DOE and throughout the federal government for its ease of management in performance monitoring. For example, this Fermilab deployment makes use of the same Ciena technology employed by Argonne National Laboratory and other research institutions on the I-WIRE network.

For additional information on Ciena's government solutions and support in the research and education community, please visit http://www.ciena.com/government.>

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