view printer-friendly version

Verizon Business Builds Atlantic Mesh Network Using Ciena’s CoreDirector

Terrestrial and undersea intelligent mesh network delivers advanced reliability and six-way route diversity for voice and data traffic of multinational business and government customers

Ciena® Corporation, the network specialist, today announced that Verizon Business is delivering its first highly-resilient mesh network based on Ciena CoreDirector® Multiservice Optical Switches across its terrestrial and undersea cable network to offer unsurpassed reliability to multinational business and government customers. The intelligent trans-Atlantic network features the most advanced service protection technology available, enabling Verizon Business to maximize service availability and ensure delivery of customers’ mission-critical voice and data traffic between Europe and the U.S.

Unlike in legacy SONET/SDH networks, protection in an intelligent CoreDirector mesh network is shared across multiple “working” routes using Ciena’s unique FastMesh™ restoration technology that can dynamically reroute services around failures using available bandwidth anywhere in the network. In addition, CoreDirector supports multiple classes of service that map service levels to network resources by combining protection and restoration with routing and signaling intelligence so services can be delivered over the route with the appropriate level of protection and lowest cost. This combination of fully-automated restoration and resiliency provides Verizon Business with a flexible network foundation to customize services to the requirements of specific customers and drive incremental revenue opportunities.

Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), is a leading provider of advanced communications and information technology (IT) solutions to large business and government customers worldwide. It owns and operates one of the most expansive IP backbone networks in the world, spanning six continents and more than 446,000 route miles. The Atlantic network is one of the largest and most route-diverse based on its six-way mesh design, which Verizon Business plans to expand in 2007 with a seventh trans-Atlantic path and additional terrestrial nodes. The Atlantic mesh network went live last summer and is supporting revenue-generating customers.

“Service availability is paramount to our customers and is therefore the focus of our strategy to differentiate our network and services from competitors,” said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of Verizon Business’ Global Network Planning. “The diversity of our mesh network combined with CoreDirector’s ability to offer multiple levels of protection while fully automating network utilization and service availability via its intelligent optical control plane helps us reduce operational costs while driving incremental revenue.”

In addition to CoreDirector, Verizon Business is also using Ciena’s ON-Center® Network and Service Management Suite that offers network operators a unique set of tools for efficient service deployment and proactive network management. ON-Center’s Service Layer Manager module communicates with the intelligent control plane of the networked CoreDirectors so it has a comprehensive view of all the nodes, links, ports and services in the network. This provides real-time benefits for performance monitoring and management of customer services, and early detection, diagnosis and resolution of potential issues. It also maintains this information over time to create comprehensive reports on historical service performance to support service level agreement measurement, capacity planning and other activities.

“This is a significant win because it not only expands Ciena’s long-standing relationship with Verizon Business, but also highlights the emergence of intelligent optical mesh networking as purchase criteria for telecom services based on a number of major financial services firms switching to Verizon Business specifically because of the reliability of its new network,” said Gary Smith, president and CEO of Ciena. “Verizon Business’ decision to use CoreDirector and its intelligent mesh capabilities provides a high-profile example of how our specialization in intelligent software and control plane technology delivers real value to customers via our FlexSelect Architecture.”

A key element of Ciena’s FlexSelect Architecture and the global market leader in optical switching, CoreDirector is a multiservice, multiprotocol optical switching system that consolidates the functionality of a multiservice provisioning platform, digital cross-connect and Ethernet switch into a single, high-capacity intelligent switching system that can reduce network operator capex by as much as 65 percent and opex by as much as 85 percent. The embedded intelligence of CoreDirector’s FlexSelect OS standards-based optical control plane provides 99.9999% reliability and real-time resource inventory discovery, databases synchronization, intelligent mapping of service requests to network resources and fully automated activation and deactivation of network resources.