CANARIE upgrades 100G research & education network with Ciena

Canadian research and education network CANARIE has deployed the 6500 packet-optical platform from Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ:CIEN) to support the 100G upgrade and network expansion of a route connecting Montreal and New York, according to the optical transport equipment vendor. The new fiber-optic network link will sustain the “big data” streams used in today’s advanced academic and scientific research.

Last year, CANARIE experienced 83% percent growth in data traffic, going from 46,149 terabytes to 84,630 terabytes. Much of this data comes from “big data” projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe. Canada’s TRIUMF facility in Vancouver is a Tier 1 data site for the LHC computing grid and uses the CANARIE network to transfer data to and from other sites.

Spanning Canada from Victoria, BC, to St John’s, NL, CANARIE’s network also connects more than 89 universities, 101 colleges, 47 public colleges, 127 provincial and federal government labs and research parks, 62 hospitals and health networks, 24 cultural institutions, thousands of K-12 schools, 12 provincial and territorial optical network partners, and more than 100 international peer networks in 80 countries.

The upgraded Montreal to New York link will provide high-performance optical transport to enable the delivery of big data streams and foster greater scientific collaboration – both in-region and internationally – for key Canadian research and education centers that are working on projects including everything from particle physics to genomics and neuroscience.

“With Ciena’s 100G technology, we are able to expand and upgrade the Montreal to New York route of our vast R&E network, while at the same time significantly reducing our operating costs and increasing performance over this busy link,” says Jim Roche, president and CEO of CANARIE. “This is a first step in doing the same at other segments of our network.”

“The TRIUMF Tier 1 LHC site is a leader in the field by being consistently at the top in terms of availability, reliability, and efficiency when compared to other sites in the world. There are several factors that are reflected in our success and the network infrastructure provided by CANARIE through providers like Ciena is certainly one of them,” added Dr. Reda Tafirout, a research scientist at TRIUMF.

Ciena has been both a research and technology partner to CANARIE for more than two decades. The upgrade of the Montreal to New York route represents the initial step in a wider upgrade of the network to 100G.

Ciena and CANARIE have also been showcasing emerging technologies and advanced applications for science, research, and education over high-speed, high capacity research networks at several recent events, including at the TERENA Networking Conference (TNC2013), and at the Vectors customer event at Ciena’s research and development lab in Ottawa, Canada.

At the TNC2013 demonstration, participants were able to control a robot arm with haptic feedback while simultaneously controlling an identical remote robot arm located miles away at another global location. To provide participants with the needed three-dimensional visual depth feedback on their movements at the remote location, the demonstration delivered ultra high-definition video streams at extremely low latency to the event venues. Multiple 3G-SDI uncompressed video streams were transmitted and kept in sync with Ciena’s Native Video Transport technology.

In its Ottawa R&D lab, Ciena showcased its software defined networking capabilities in a demonstration that showed 4K video delivery at 5 Gbps over the CANARIE network using Ciena packet networking technology featuring OpenFlow 1.3. As part of the demonstration, a video was sent from the StarLight R&E hub in Chicago across a Ciena connected link over the CANARIE network to Ciena’s lab in Ottawa.

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