Shows the ability to provide 50 percent more capacity at longer distance to meet growing demand from scientific research, OTT, disaster recovery and DCI applications

Ciena (NYSE: CIEN), CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation, and the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility Consortium showed the ability to greatly improve network efficiencies using the open interfaces and programmable modulation of Ciena’s Waveserver™ stackable  interconnect system.  Announced at this week’s TNC16 Networking Conference, the trial transmitted 300 Gb/s capacity using the latest coherent optical modulation available via Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 Extreme chipset.

Key Facts:

• In today’s increasingly connected society, global research and education (R&E) networks like CANARIE and StarLight must continually evolve their networks to support bandwidth-hungry services and applications. Last year, CANARIE transmitted 172 Petabytes of data, continuing a trend that has seen annual data growth of 50 percent over the last several years. Programmable coherent optics inside Ciena’s powerful platforms will support these surging bandwidth needs by optimizing capacity for any distance to help improve the way researchers around the globe work together.
• The 150 Gb/s per wavelength 8QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) trial was conducted on a live research network that connects Ciena’s labs in Ottawa with StarLight’s Chicago-based R&E communication services exchange facility, at a distance of more than 1,440 km. A network operator’s power to choose 8QAM modulation means more flexibility in applications Waveserver can enable, providing higher capacity than QPSK, and greater optical reach than 16QAM. All three programmable modulations will be generally available on Ciena’s Waveserver this summer, allowing it to support any-haul Data Center Interconnect (DCI) applications efficiently and cost-effectively.

• Another key benefit of the 150 Gb/s 8QAM technology is the ability to provide high-capacity DCI, which is instrumental in connecting today’s app-centric, on-demand society. With Ciena’s unique multi-dimensional coding implementation of 8QAM, Waveserver gives data center operators more capacity at farther distances and lower operating costs.

Executive Comments:

• “Traffic on our network continues to surge as we enable Canadian researchers, educators and innovators to leverage advanced digital tools and massive data resources. This trial demonstrated that Ciena’s Waveserver is capable of enabling us to scale our network in order to help keep Canada at the forefront of digital research and innovation.”
  - Mark Wolff, Chief Technology Officer, CANARIE
• “This innovative trial of a next–generation, flexible optical WAN networking is just one of many examples of the value of our ongoing R&D partnership with Ciena. By continuing to push the boundaries of what networks can achieve, we are able to open up new opportunities for the global research community. ”
  - Joe Mambretti, Director, StarLight

• “Ciena benefits from open collaboration with our Research and Education partners, who have been at the forefront of developing and deploying communications technologies. This trial allowed us to push the boundaries of advanced transmission technology in ways that can only be truly validated in a real world environment.  This extends our long partnership with the R&E community and supports the exploration not just of networking, but of human discovery.”- Rod Wilson, Senior Director, Ciena

About CANARIECANARIE designs and delivers digital infrastructure, and drives its adoption for Canada’s research, education and innovation communities. CANARIE keeps Canada at the forefront of digital research and innovation, fundamental to a vibrant digital economy.

CANARIE’s roots are in advanced networking, and CANARIE continues to evolve the national ultra-high-speed backbone network that enables data-intensive, leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world. One million researchers, scientists and students at over 2,000 Canadian institutions, including universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories have access to the CANARIE Network.

CANARIE also leads the development of research software tools that enable researchers to more quickly and easily access research data, tools, and peers. In support of Canada’s high-tech entrepreneurs, CANARIE offers cloud-computing services to help them accelerate product development and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Twelve provincial and territorial network partners, together with CANARIE, collectively form Canada’s National Research and Education Network. This powerful digital infrastructure connects Canadians to the national and global data, tools, colleagues, and classrooms fuel the engine of innovation in today’s digital economy.

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About the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange FacilityThe StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility provides advanced network services optimized for high-performance applications, especially data-intensive scientific research. StarLight provides high-performance multi-layer switching among participating networks, including true optical switching for wavelengths.  StarLight is a core exchange facility for the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), a highly distributed world-wide facility based on optical fiber that enables the creation of customized private networks, See www.startap.net/starlight.

About Ciena
Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with its OPⁿ architecture for next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. For updates on Ciena news, follow us on Twitter @Ciena or on LinkedIn.

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