Ciena Insights is Ciena's official news blog, keeping you informed about Ciena news and happenings, and giving you a forum for engaging in conversations with Ciena. Bo Gowan is the blog moderator, and Ciena's social media manager.
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Chris Janson is a senior product manager in Ciena’s industry marketing group where he is presently focused on the needs of government, research and educational customers.
Roughly 460 people gathered at a waterfront Cape Cod hotel on May 14 and 15 to report progress and exchange ideas on regional economic development empowered by broadband networks. The SmarterCape Summit 2012 enjoyed active participation from local community leaders, government officials and industry.
At the center of discussion was utilization of the OpenCape 100Gbps broadband network, a 350 mile fiber-optic backbone that promises to offer state-of-the-art IT capabilities to Cape Cod, the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and southeastern Massachusetts.
Funded through a series of grants from the county, state and federal government, OpenCape is a non-profit community effort formed by people interested in improving regional connectivity and the broader economic impact of a well-oiled communications infrastructure on healthcare, education, energy, transportation, public safety, environment and commerce.
The OpenCape vision is a network that empowers applications to build a “Smarter” Cape Cod. OpenCape will not offer last mile service; it is a middle-mile public resource with connectivity provided to selected points in the region. Anchor tenant users will access the network and purchase service through CapeNet, a separate private company that OpenCape has contracted to construct and operate the network.
Initial users include the Massachusetts Air National Guard and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Construction across the region will be completed by January of 2013 with 1GbE access points installed in each town within Barnstable County.
The summit featured keynote presentations and break out discussions that provided detail on the SmarterCape vision and case studies to illustrate the effect of similar efforts in localities across the US, Canada and Europe. Participants from many different backgrounds and affiliations offered ideas and needs for how applications could help the community.
At the local government level, the intent is to bundle IT needs for each locality under an umbrella of services for public safety, permitting, tax assessment and other citizen needs. Linkages for libraries, schools and hospitals were also discussed. One environmental application is a wastewater impact tool that will help towns and residents understand their individual impact upon Cape Cod’s sole source aquifer.
A common theme across the summit was that the network is about far more than improving internet access or cellular phone service. The longer term the intent is for OpenCape to become a public asset that improves the region’s quality of life and economic health for the next 100 years.
18 May 2012, 05:47 PM EDT - Rohan David Emmanuel —
OpenCape is really doing awesome jobs. Especially the work at local government level is exceptional. Such infrastructure means a much boosted performance. And to add to the positivity is the linkages that would be provided to local organization. I am tech freak and this is really really awesome.
Best Regards,
Rohan D.
Founder & Chairperson, Coffee Shop Gurus
http://www.coffeeshopgurus.com
Jim Morin is Product Line Director, Managed Services & Enterprise, and Ciena’s resident expert on Cloud Networking. Jim is one of several Ciena speakers at next week’s EMC World 2012 conference in Las Vegas.
The enterprise IT world as we know it is undergoing a revolution. In the traditional model, an enterprise organization’s business critical applications are supported by an ecosystem of servers, storage systems and networks that are built by the company's IT department via an on-premise data center that it owns and manages.
It is a model that has worked for decades, but it is also one that requires a tremendous commitment of resources and budget and is restricted by the enterprise’s own computing, storage and networking capabilities.
The cloud is now fundamentally changing this – creating a shift that is forever transforming both the way data is being managed and the nature and economics of IT delivery.
The promise of Cloud Service Providers is their ability to store, process, and move data – as needed – in remote, virtual environments. These on-demand deployments of IT resources offer more agility, scalability, resiliency and efficiency than an enterprise organization could ever accomplish within its own walls.
However, current cloud utility is restricted by today’s inadequate cloud networks. On one side, the Internet is ubiquitous but its performance is lacking. While on the other side, conventional private line or VPN services provide the required performance demands, but their ‘always on’ nature makes them too expensive at high bandwidths.
Because most networks today simply don’t deliver the right performance and economics needed for cloud services, we have only begun to scratch the surface of what the cloud model can offer.
Ciena is now changing this, delivering faster, smarter and more affordable networks that can advance the cloud toward its full potential as a high-performance service delivery platform that breaks free from current cost and performance barriers.
The result is what we call a Data Center Without Walls.
The Data Center Without Walls uses the network to seamlessly connect a larger pool of resources shared between both enterprise and provider data centers.
It creates an entirely new IT model that federates enterprise customer data centers with multiple geographically distributed cloud provider data centers to unlock the full power of cloud computing. All network and datacenter assets become virtualized and pooled, enabling fluid placement and migration of workloads according to changing needs.
As a result, cloud service performance, resiliency and economics are all improved.
Organizations can now own their own data center for base operations and simply ‘rent the spike’ – on demand – from cloud service providers when workload demands exceed the on-premise data center capacity – a model referred to as a hybrid cloud environment. Or they can choose to move everything to the cloud to take advantage of its improved economies of scale.
Next week at EMC World 2012, Ciena will be demonstrating this concept of a data center without walls. We will create a simulated hybrid cloud between our show floor booth and our mobile innovation lab truck, and demonstrate a variety of scenarios that show how intelligent, scalable network connectivity, with minimal latency and dynamic performance, can enable providers to deliver IT as a flexible, efficient and reliable service.
Visit us at booth #537 and #637 to hear more about Data Center Without Walls and see the concept in action.
Do a Google News search for the term “100G” and you’re likely to find articles for the following topics:
VimpelCom deploys 100G in Russia
Ciena lights Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s 100G European link
euNetworks rolls out 100 Gigabit capable network across Europe
Verizon to offer 100G links, resilient mesh on optical networks
Yes, it has a very busy week for 100G news, and for Ciena (see tag: 100G). In fact, it's been so busy that on this blog we haven’t even had a chance yet to crow about our newest 100G customer euNetworks, which yesterday announced that it is connecting eight major cities across Europe with Ciena 100G technology -- Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Dublin, and Manchester.
euNetworks says the 100G deployment satisfies demand “both for greater capacity and 100G circuits,” and the European operator is just the latest indicator that 100G optical transport is truly moving from early adoption to mainstream deployment.
Except, wait, as of this morning we already have a new “newest” 100G customer. This morning Ciena announced that SSE Telecoms, the UK’s fourth largest telecoms operator, has selected Ciena as its exclusive provider of 100G technology for deployment across its UK national network (and the 100G network is already live).
The mains driver of SSE Telecom’s 100G deployment are the connectivity of data centers across Britain and the introduction of new high-capacity services. But the operator has realized a variety of OPEX benefits as well, including a 46% reduction in power consumption and a 70% reduction in footprint when compared to a traditional architecture based on 10G technology.
Both euNetworks and SSE Telecoms are using the 100G capabilities of Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform equipped with our WaveLogic coherent optical processors. And as with several other recently announced Ciena 100G customers, both have also been able to add 100G wavelengths alongside existing in-service 40G channels on their network with the simplicity of adding a 100G line card.
As industry pub Telecom Ramblings put it in this recent article, “this is definitely looking like the year 100G goes mainstream.” If the last few weeks of Ciena 100G news is any indicator, then that statement is looking to be right on target.
In fact, Ciena has now shipped more than 14,000 coherent 40G/100G line interfaces to more than 120 customers across the globe, with nearly 13 million coherent kilometers deployed worldwide. And while it’s great to be able to see numbers like that, it’s even better for me to be able to talk about specific customer names and deployments in such abundance that I’m having a hard time keeping up with them here on our blog.
by Steve Alexander, Chief Technology Officer, Ciena
16 May 2012, 08:05 AM EDT
Steve Alexander is Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Products and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, and counts more than 20 years in the telecoms industry. In today’s post, Steve discusses open standards and the recently unveiled Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) guidelines.
The use of open standards has been one of the fundamental “change agents” in the networking industry and it’s a bedrock part of Ciena’s technology DNA. When we started the company, we adopted a “superset of the existing standards approach” that created the industry’s first truly open DWDM system.
We repeated that approach as a co-founder of the Optical Inter-Networking Forum (OIF) and its control-plane based OIF interoperability events. More recently, we’ve used coherent optics and advanced digital signal processing to introduce open systems into the historically highly-proprietary submarine cable industry to enable 100G Ethernet services that cross oceans.
Open standards are most often associated with encouraging creativity by enabling a diverse and rapidly expanding user group, and once they become widespread, open standards generally support the most cost-effective scaling, too. We can see a time in the near future where the combination of increasing network intelligence combined with the use of open standards-based network programming interfaces (NPIs) enables physical network resources to be virtualized, just as we today routinely work with virtualized compute and storage resources.
This combination of connect (the networking function) with compute and store, to allow us to build more capable and efficient infrastructure machines, will be key if we are to enable infrastructure to grow by 10X and 100X while not costing 10X or 100X as much.
Last week, another key piece needed to enable a scalable infrastructure was unveiled . The new Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) from IBM is on its way to becoming industry best-practice for transforming data-centers, utilizing open standards to achieve cost-effective scaling while supporting a flatter, more converged network architecture.
This looks to be a nearly ideal approach to allow the connect, compute, and store resources to be virtualized and operationally united for simplicity and scale, and Ciena is pleased to support the ODIN initiative to help achieve this through open standards.
The Wide Area Network, including networks operated by carriers, will be a critical component of the combined “platform infrastructure” and Ciena looks forward to leading the development and inclusion of this component within the framework.
16 May 2012, 12:53 PM EDT - Casimer DeCusatis —
I'm pleased that Ciena has endorsed the use of open industry standards in the data center network. Over time, this is likely to be the most cost-effective approach to scaling networks and supporting new features. If you're interested in learning more about ODIN, please visit IBM's data center networking blog at https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/roller-ui/allblogs?userid=2700058MPY&lang=en_us
Ciena today added two new names to its public customer list in the form of VimpelCom and Perseus Telecom. Together, the two new customer deployments show Ciena's increasing leadership in two competitive markets.
1st 100G deployment in Russia
In the case of VimpelCom, a global telecoms service provider with major operations in Russia, Ciena's coherent 100G optical transport technology has been deployed across a critical 587km route connecting the Russian citites of Ufa and Samara to accommodate the need for additional core network capacity. The live link is believed to be the first ever 100G commercial deployment in Russia.
As an existing (though unannounced) Ciena 40G customer, VimpelCom was able to leverage its existing Ciena 6500 infrastructure and simultaneously run 40G and 100G wavelengths across the network. This simple "plug-and-play" upgrade to 100G is one that we also highlighted last week with Cable&Wireless Worldwide (see Cable&Wireless goes 100G with Ciena).
ADV Consulting, a Ciena Platinum BizConnect partner, was instrumental in the implementation phase of the project.
Trans-Atlantic low latency
Perseus Telecom is a global telecom provider with a focus on ultra low-latency networks. Last month Perseus announced a new ultra-low latency submarine link across the Atlantic in partnership with Reliance Globalcom (see that release here). Called QuanTA, the trans-Altantic cable stretches from Long Island, New York to Lands End, United Kingdom.
But Perseus didn't stop at the beach head with its low latency network. Perseus has selected Ciena’s equipment, software and services to build an end-to-end, ultra low-latency network that spans metro and submarine infrastructure to connect the global financial hubs of New York City, New Jersey, London and Frankfurt.
Equipment deployed in the build includes Ciena's 6500 platform for the trans-Atlantic link, and the Ciena 4200 Advanced Services Platform and 5150 Service Aggregation Switch in each metro tuned as ultra low-latency access points to QuanTA and the global trading markets.
Next week Ciena will be opening the doors of its European headquarters office for a public "open day", where we'll have product demos on display and some of our technology experts to talk to. The event will be held next Wednesday, May 23rd, from 12:30-4:00pm London time, and you are welcome to drop by anytime during the event (to register just click here).
Ciena's London office is nestled inside Tech City, the UK's version of Silicon Valley that is a centre of technology and innovation and home to more than 700 tech and digital creative companies. A concerted effort has been established to foster investment in Tech City to further establish the area as Europe's centre for innovation.
One investment Ciena's Mervyn Kelly has been espousing for the area is further broadband infstastructure buildout. As he highlighted in this guest post on the Tech City blog last week, these world-class companies also need a world-class telecoms infrastructure to support existing businesses and attract new ones to the area.
To that end, Ciena's open day next week is an opportunity for local Tech City businesses to see technologies such as Cloud Services, data-security, and high capacity networks in action. Some of the world's foremost experts on networking technology will also be on-hand to talk tech, and even discuss how this summer's Olympic games will spur new broadband infrastructure and services for the Tech City region.
The event will be held next Wednesday, May 23rd, from 12:30-4:00pm London time, and you are welcome to drop by anytime during the event. For more information and to register, see the full invitation here.
Last week when Verizon announced that it was building additional control plane technology into its network as part of a “new strategic initiative”, it caused quite a reaction. Anytime a service provider with a global network that spans more than 500,000 route miles talks about a new initiative, people tend to take notice.
That’s especially true when it’s something like control plane, which isn’t a topic that gets a lot of attention or media coverage. In fact, the Verizon announcement spurred more than one person to ask us, “what exactly is an optical control plane?”.
At its core, an intelligent optical control plane is software that controls all aspects of configuring connections between optical switches across a network. With sometimes hundreds of nodes across a network, managing such a complex infrastructure requires a control plane that, given some parameters, will make decisions on its own (thus the “intelligent” in intelligent control plane).
And as it turns out, service providers are increasingly focused on the need for an optical control plane. In fact, a recent Infonetics survey revealed that control plane was mentioned by more service providers than cost as one of the three most important features that sets vendors apart during evaluation (see Infonetics: Carriers say Ciena top optical vendor).
Ciena has been investing in optical control plane technology for many years now, first for SONET/SDH networks and more recently as part of our OTN switching solutions (e.g. the Ciena 5430 that Verizon is deploying). In fact, we’re on our 7th generation of our OneConnect optical control plane.
So to help clarify the question of “what is an optical control plane?”, we put together the below infographic that walks through the details. Take a look and let us know if you have any questions.
In what it calls “two key initiatives,” Verizon today unveiled plans to expand its use of intelligent control plane capabilities and extend its 100G transport efforts into metro locations. Verizon says the two moves are a strategic part of its global optical network transformation.
"By combining our expanded control plane capabilities with extended 100G technology, Verizon is building the network of the future. It's no longer about miles and scope. It's about leveraging strategies that further enable us to deliver the promise of cloud-based and mobility-enabled industry solutions,” said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of global IP and transport planning and technology for Verizon in today’s Verizon press release.
Intelligent optical control plane
Verizon’s first major initiative is to build additional control plane technology into its network infrastructure. In an optical network, an intelligent control plane is basically software that controls all aspects of configuring connections between optical switches across a network. As networks get bigger and involve a large number of network nodes, managing such a complex network requires a control plane that can automate network discovery, provisioning and, given some parameters, can even make decisions on its own.
To this end, Verizon announced today that it has deployed the Ciena 5430 Reconfigurable Switching System. With the 5430’s OTN switching and control plane capabilities, Verizon will be able to provide near real-time provisioning of specified new circuits, a significant potential differentiator in the enterprise services market.
Another key benefit of control plane technology is its role in enabling rapid and automated recovery of complex optical mesh networks, something Verizon has been at the forefront of for many years with its intercontinental submarine networks.
For example, during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, Verizon’s submarine mesh network used control plane and optical mesh capabilities built into its Ciena CoreDirector nodes to survive multiple fiber cuts and restore every customer without disruption. (see Optical mesh network proves its worth for Verizon during Japanese earthquake). In the below video, Verizon’s Ihab Tarazi details a similar cable cut event in 2009 off the coast of Taiwan.
Verizon moves 100G to the metro
The second major initiative Verizon announced today is the plan to deploy coherent 100G in metro networks. Verizon has been the clear leader in the deployment of 100G optical transport, dating back to the industry’s first commercial 100G deployment between Paris and Frankfurt back in 2009 and more recently expanding to deploy 100G in the U.S. (see Verizon lights up its first U.S. 100G, plans for more).
But to this point Verizon’s 100G moves have been focused on its long-haul network backbone. Today’s news is confirmation that Verizon plans to extend its 100G efforts to the metro, something the company hinted at earlier this year at OFC/NFOEC. Verizon said in its press release that it expects to deploy 100G into major markets on a global basis during the first half of 2013.
Global service provider Cable&Wireless Worldwide (CWW) has made the jump to 100G on a 2,800 km span that connects London to Monaco with drop-off points in Milan, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Amsterdam, making it the longest 100G link in Europe deployed to date.
CWW, which boasts an international cable network that spans approximately 425,000 km in length, is using Ciena's 6500 Packet Optical Platform and WaveLogic coherent optical processors to deploy the 100G link. The deployment was made simpler by the fact that CWW had previously installed Ciena's 6500 platform outfitted with 40G line cards on its intercontinental network. This allowed the addition of 100G cards to the existing network so that 40G and 100G channels are running along the same fiber. It also means that the 100G span is already up and running.
CWW boasts an international cable network that spans 425,000km in length
One of the key drivers for this Pan-Euro 100G link is the backhaul of the traffic arriving from the Europe India Gateway (EIG) submarine cable. CWW is part of the consortium that owns this cable and the new 100G network connects down to the EIG landing station in Monaco.
CWW is a longtime Ciena customer (in fact, here's a press release I found from back in 1997) and the latest major network operator to make the move to 100G using Ciena gear. Other recent 100G customers include AAPT in Australia, BT, PWWC Global and Lightower Fiber Networks (tag: 100G)
The huge bandwidth and supercomputing requirements of advanced scientific research institutions and their need to share massive amounts of data has traditionally driven research and education (R&E) networks to the bleeding edge of communications technology.
The case is no different with 100G, where the R&E community has been one of Ciena's biggest partners in the race to 100G optical transport over the last few years. Ciena's head-start in enabling 100G transport and our close existing relationships with many of the world's R&E institutions resulted in quite a few 100G deployments over the last few years, including Internet2, SURFnet, ESnet, RoEduNet and KISTI.
Tomorrow, Ciena will be talking in great detail about 100G for R&E networks when we host a webcast at 8:00am ET / 1:00pm London time. The call will be hosted by Mervyn Kelly, Ciena's director of EMEA marketing, and the call will have a bit of a European focus. You can register for the event here.
In addition, we just finished the below video on 100G for R&E networks and includes comments from several of our R&E customers. You can also see the video on our YouTube channel here.
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Chris Janson is a senior product manager in Ciena’s industry marketing group where he is presently focused on the needs of government, research and educational customers.
The summit featured keynote presentations and break out discussions that provided detail on the SmarterCape vision and case studies to illustrate the effect of similar efforts in localities across the US, Canada and Europe. Participants from many different backgrounds and affiliations offered ideas and needs for how applications could help the community.
Jim Morin is Product Line Director, Managed Services & Enterprise, and Ciena’s resident expert on Cloud Networking. Jim is one of several Ciena speakers at next week’s 
The promise of Cloud Service Providers is their ability to store, process, and move data – as needed – in remote, virtual environments. These on-demand deployments of IT resources offer more agility, scalability, resiliency and efficiency than an enterprise organization could ever accomplish within its own walls.
cloud computing. All network and datacenter assets become virtualized and pooled, enabling fluid placement and migration of workloads according to changing needs. 
euNetworks says the 100G deployment satisfies demand “both for greater capacity and 100G circuits,” and the European operator is just the latest indicator that 100G optical transport is truly moving from early adoption to mainstream deployment.
Steve Alexander is Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Products and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, and counts more than 20 years in the telecoms industry. In today’s post, Steve discusses open standards and the recently unveiled Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) guidelines. 
Next week Ciena will be opening the doors of its European headquarters office for a public "open day", where we'll have product demos on display and some of our technology experts to talk to. The event will be held next Wednesday, May 23rd, from 12:30-4:00pm London time, and you are welcome to drop by anytime during the event (to register just 
In what it calls “two key initiatives,” Verizon today 
Global service provider Cable&Wireless Worldwide (
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