DANTE, Infinera turn up 2 Tbps in less than 12 minutes on GEANT

Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) and DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), which operates the European GÉANT research and education network, say they installed and activated 2 Tbps of capacity and provisioned a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) service in less than 12 minutes combined.

The parties used production DTN-X platforms deployed on the GÉANT fiber-optic network backbone between Amsterdam and Frankfurt. The 671-km route included 10 spans and currently is in service. DANTE selected the DTN-X for GÉANT last year (see “DANTE selects Infinera DTN-X platform for GEANT Research and Education Network”).

"When Infinera was involved in the procurement process for the GÉANT backbone they made a number of claims about their ability to turn up long-haul capacity very rapidly, and we decided to put those claims to the test," said Michael Enrico, CTO of DANTE. "The fact is that critical science experiments across Europe are generating immense quantities of data that are often difficult to fit into a forecasting process, so this ability to turn up, or redirect long haul capacity in a matter of minutes will help us transform the service we offer to our national research and education network partners."

The 2 Tbps of capacity required four 500-Gbps superchannels; a 100GbE service was then provisioned across the link. A time-lapse video of the provisioning process is available here.

"This was a genuine test of our rapid provisioning capability, using real production equipment and software," said Geoff Bennett, director of solutions and technology at Infinera. "If we had used conventional 100G transponders we would need a total of 40 of them -- 20 at each end. But the Infinera 500G solution allows an engineer to provision up to five times as much capacity in a single operational cycle. Enabling our customers to use time as a weapon is a key value of coherent superchannels."

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