July 20, 2005 Hayward, CA and Ann Arbor, MI -- Glimmerglass today announced that Internet2, a U.S.-advanced networking consortium led by the research and higher education community, has selected the company's intelligent optical switches for deployment in five national network nodes located in Seattle, Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The consortium's Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project is building a national network testbed to examine the requirements and performance of next generation networks that combine packet and optical technologies. The company's switches will be used in the testbed to dynamically provision high-bandwidth optical data circuits between network interfaces. The consortium says the HOPI project is developing and testing a network that will perform this process on demand, as opposed to traditional provisioning intervals that can take weeks or months.

"The Glimmerglass optical switches offer extraordinary flexibility deep within our network infrastructure by enabling switching and set up of circuits in virtually any node," explains Rick Summerhill, Internet2's director of network research, architecture, and technologies, and HOPI design team co-chair. "These switches can essentially re-cable all of the physical fiber connections between network interfaces, optical devices, and equipment on the fly, in milliseconds, remotely and at the touch of a button. Moreover, the Glimmerglass switches are particularly appealing because they are easy to use and simple to integrate into our network."

The HOPI nationwide testbed uses facilities from Internet2's packet-based Abilene Network, MAN/LAN exchange point, nationwide National LambdaRail (NLR) optical infrastructure, and several regional networks.

"The future network architecture is being built right now by the Internet2 community," concludes Robert Lundy, CEO of Glimmerglass. "We're excited that the HOPI team selected our company and is relying on our products to support such an important national program."