StarWave upgrades R&E network exchange with Ciena

Nov. 11, 2014
Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) and the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) have upgraded StarWave, a Chicago-based research and education (R&E) communication services exchange facility with Ciena’s 8700 Packetwave Platform. This upgrade will facilitate data transfers for multiple sciences, such as data flows used by high energy physicists investigating particle collisions, and medical researchers sharing massive genomic data files.

Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) and the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) have upgraded StarWave, a Chicago-based research and education (R&E) communication services exchange facility with Ciena's 8700 Packetwave Platform. This upgrade will facilitate data transfers for multiple sciences, such as data flows used by high energy physicists investigating particle collisions, and medical researchers sharing massive genomic data files.

Ciena’s 8700 Packetwave platform offers 10 Gigabit Ethernet to 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) aggregation and switching over DWDM (see "Ciena offers metro-optimized packet switch with integrated optics").

The StarWave multi-100-Gbps exchange, located at the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility Consortium in Chicago, supports large-capacity, long-duration, and low-latency individual data flow transfers. To boost network connectivity and help researchers transfer even greater amounts of scientific data and applications, MREN is deploying Ciena’s new 8700 platform for 100GbE interconnection.

This upgrade strengthens Ciena's long-standing collaborative relationship with MREN, a seven-state regional network, StarLight, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR). The collaborators’ mission is to develop new networking techniques, technologies, and services to support petascale science and computing-intensive research that crosses a number of disciplines including high-energy physics, computational genomics and brain simulations.

Ciena and these collaborators are also using software-defined networking (SDN) technologies to explore new virtualized network models to increase performance and flexibility for researchers. The work includes the National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) initiative that supports "at scale" research in networking, distributed systems, security, and novel applications. Through its participation in this activity, Ciena is developing additional capabilities on the 8700 to allow these researchers to integrate SDN technologies with 100-Gbps services.

"Large-scale data-intensive science has a history of driving next-generation high-performance networking because science researchers encounter major communication technology challenges years before other communities," said Joe Mambretti, director, Metropolitan Research & Education Network.

Later this month at the Supercomputing (SC14) conference in New Orleans, multiple national and international 100-Gbps demonstrations will leverage this network and its new capabilities to showcase a variety of advanced R&E demonstrations.

For more information on packet-optical systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer's Guide.