NATIONAL LAMBDARAIL CHOOSES CISCO IP NGN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR STRATEGIC OPTICAL NETWORK UPGRADE
Cisco ONS 15454 optical routers help enable and advance research activities in USA
Cypress, Calif. , July 10, 2008 -- National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of leading U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, announced today that it has chosen the Cisco® ONS 15454 DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) solution for its strategic Internet Protocol Next-Generational Network (IP NGN) upgrade. NLR’s nationwide optical infrastructure, used extensively by the research community in the U.S., will benefit by having more reliable services and future enhancements to higher capacity and faster speeds in line with emerging standards.
“The Cisco ONS 15454 platform gives NLR users a great advantage,” said Grover Browning, NLR’s director of engineering and leader of the evaluation team. “Because the Cisco equipment has an extended-reach capability and is much less expensive to deploy, we can lower the barriers of optical networking access and encourage researchers to utilize fast network pipes. We evaluated vendors across the DWDM spectrum and chose Cisco as the complete solution – offering low cost, great reliability and proven technical features -- paired with a corporate commitment to our academic community.”
“The high-bandwidth, data-intensive applications that characterize many of NLR’s larger customers makes its infrastructure an ideal environment to showcase the performance and integrity of Cisco’s optical transport platform,” said Surya Panditi, vice president and general manager of Cisco access and transport technology group, which includes the Cisco optical business unit. “We are proud of our long-standing partnership with National LambdaRail, and its selection of our ONS 15454 is evidence of our solution’s strength, value and our vision of how IP transport will evolve.”
“The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP platform also provides NLR with an industry-leading, IP next-generation network transport solution capable of supporting IP-over-DWDM architecture and scaling in-service up to 40-gigabits-per-second and up to100 gigabits DWDM,” Panditi said.
The defining characteristic of the NLR infrastructure is its ability to support many distinct networks for the U.S. research community using the same core infrastructure. The planned upgrade will involve the northern tier of NLR covering 6,349 route miles – from Los Angeles through Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C., to Jacksonville, Fla.
The Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) is a DWDM solution that features two- through eight-degree reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology that enables wavelength provisioning across entire networks and eliminates the need for optical-to-electrical-to-optical (OEO) transponder conversions. The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP interconnects with Layer-2, Layer-3 and storage area network (SAN) devices at rates up to 40-Gbps. It delivers any service type to any network location and supports all DWDM topologies.
About National LambdaRail
National LambdaRail, Inc. (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers. Visit http://www.nlr.net for more information.