Ciena Corporation has announced that Northwestern University in Evanston, III., has deployed CN 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform with re-configurable optical add/drop multi-plexer (ROADM (News - Alert)) functionality to increase network capacity across the University campus. 

 

Northwestern University has accepted the service as part of its ongoing research collaboration and resource sharing for its scientific and educational communities. The University plans to offer a highly collaborative academic experience by enabling advanced computing and communication technologies such as grid computing and video-based distance learning, while pioneering large-scale science and technology research projects.

 

In order to enable real-time collaboration regionally or nationally, the University requires dynamic networks that can resiliently access and transfer bandwidth-intensive data and computing resources, says Tim Ward (News - Alert), associate director of Telecommunications and Network Services at Northwestern University.

 

For this, the University requires an infrastructure that remains agile enough to handle smaller, daily bandwidth demands for more than 90 school-based centers and 20 interdisciplinary research centers, Ward continued.

 

With the ability to aggregate and distribute thousands of on-demand programmable services from a single platform, Ciena’s CN 4200 RS with ROADM will support the network traffic aggregation between the Evanston and Chicago campus location of the University. It will also support production applications such as data replication for storage backup.

 

Ciena’s platform is ideally suited to support dynamic provisioning of high-bandwidth connectivity. It 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.

 

In effect, Ciena solution enables the University to deliver high-performance network transport with rapid provisioning, no packet loss and the lowest latency possible. In addition, Ciena’s CN 4200 ROADM enables mesh connectivity for any-to-any routing, ensuring high availability and shared protection paths to maximize network efficiency and resource utilization, the company said.

 

“Ciena has helped provide a flexible network infrastructure to meet our current traffic growth requirements while creating an architecture that is capable of supporting any future network expansions and service needs,” Ward said.

 

“As today’s research and education networks evolve to support advanced applications, it is increasingly important that networks remain agile and adaptive,” said Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena.