Ciena Insights Blog

BT and Ciena Light 800G Super-Channel across 410km link in UK

Bo Gowan — Fri May 24 04:39:00 PDT 2013

In the never-ending quest to squeeze more bandwidth out of a wavelength of light, Ciena and BT yesterday announced the successful transmission of a stunning 800G super-channel across BT's core optical network (here's the press release).

This bleeding-edge trial was conducted in March, and also included the transmission of simultaneous coherent optical signals at a variety of speeds, including 40G, 100G, 200G, 400G as well as the 800G super-channel -- all using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 coherent technology embedded in our 6500 Packet-Optical Platform.

What makes this networking feat so extraordinary is the conditions of the test. This trail was not conducted in a pristine and sterilized lab environment. BT intentionally chose a 410km high Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) fiber link on its optical network between BT's Adastral Park Research and Development Centre in Ipswich and the iconic BT Tower in Central London -- a link that was in fact previously unsuitable for traditional non-coherent transmission at 10G speeds (quite a testament to the power of Ciena's WaveLogic 3 coherent technology).

The news is a confirmation of sorts to BT's previously stated intent to remain at the leading edge of networking speeds. Back in late 2011 when BT originally picked Ciena as its 100G supplier, the company was already expressing the need to move to 400G speeds in the future (see BT picks Ciena 100G for 21CN deployment, talks 400G).

Details of the trial

Using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 coherent optical chipset, Ciena and BT lit a series of ultra-high speed wavelengths across the 410km span using both single and super-channel techniques. The 800G transmission is believed to be the world's first successful field trial of an 800G super-channel. 200G, 400G and 800G speeds were accomplished using a 16QAM modulation format introduced in WaveLogic 3. For more information on the various WaveLogic 3 modulation formats and their uses, watch this video on WaveLogic 3 modulation.

A 16-QAM modulation format enables 200G capacities vs the 100G capacity of QPSK

In one part of the trial, 16QAM-based 400G traffic was carried over the network alongside adjacent 40G and 100G wavelengths that were using a QPSK modulation format, showing the ability to migrate to higher speeds on a wavelength-by-wavelength basis.

Other combinations of simultaneous wavelengths were tested as well, including having multiple 200G 16QAM wavelengths running in adjacent 50GHz channels as well as beside QPSK wavelengths, with each inside a standard 50Ghz.

If the term super-channel is new to you, it can be defined as an evolution in optical technology in which several optical carriers are combined together to create a single manageable wavelength of the desired capacity. As capacity needs grow past 200G (which 16QAM can provide), it is the use of these multi-carrier super-channels that help provide a means of increasing the traffic carrying capacity of the network. You can see an example of a super-channel in action in this video of a Terabit demo from our Ottawa R&D lab.

BT Tower image courtesy of BT.

In the Lab with the Ciena 6500’s new packet features

Bo Gowan — Wed May 22 05:20:00 PDT 2013

Last week Ciena unveiled significant new packet switching capabilities on our flagship 6500 Packet-Optical platform (see Ciena 6500: Extreme Packet Makeover Edition). The new capabilities, branded as Ciena’s E-Suite packet modules for the 6500, fully round out the switching proficiencies for a platform that has already won awards and acclaim for its 100G coherent and OTN switching capabilities.

But what exactly are these new packet switching capabilities? To get those answers, we visited the very lab in Ottawa where these new capabilities were developed.

In that lab we found Gerald Smallegange, a senior systems and solutions architect for the 6500 platform. Gerald has been with the company for 20 years, and was part of the packet team that developed the first ever packet-optical cards for the 6500 platform (which included resilient packet ring, L2SS, and L2 MOTR).

These days, Gerald is focusing on the latest generation of packet switching capabilities for the 6500, and he was more than happy to walk us through a demo from Ciena’s Ottawa R&D playground in the below video.

If you’re more of the white paper and spec sheet type, you’re in luck, as Ciena has provided a wide variety of detailed specs for the new packet features. I suggest starting off at the completely revamped 6500 Family product page, which includes some great pictures of the various chassis and card options on the 6500 as well as a nifty 3D product rendering.

There is also a brand new product page for our eMOTR cards. These Ethernet-enabled Muxponder modules are the “card-based switching” part of the E-Suite, and come in single slot and dual slot variants. The page includes a full list of features and product specs, and there is also a new PDF data sheet specifically for the eMOTR line-up.

Another source for details on the platform’s new packet switching capabilities is a live webcast scheduled for May 30th, hosted by Francois Locoh-Donou, Ciena’s Senior VP, Global Products Group, and the head of all Ciena R&D efforts. Francois will be joined by analysts Sterling Perrin and Stan Hubbard of Heavy Reading, as well as Steve Fisher of Integra and Mike Adams of Ciena. Register here for the webcast.

Infographic: The history of optical and Ethernet

Bo Gowan — Tue May 21 08:55:00 PDT 2013

This week the communications industry will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ethernet, with many descending on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for this week's Ethernet Innovation Summit to celebrate.

Ethernet's seemingly constant state of evolution -- from a limited technology to connect LAN devices into today's increasingly dominant connectivity service across the WAN -- is a story that is well-told. But what I find interesting in that story is the parallel evolution of another technology, optical networking.

The two technologies are siblings of sorts, with fiber-optics being the older brother seven years senior (fiber-optic communications was born in 1966, Ethernet in 1973). And as they've grown up, they have become increasingly intertwined.

In the below infographic, we've laid out the history and evolution of both technologies, including major milestones for each. As they continue to evolve and grow, it seems certain that optical and Ethernet technologies will become both more a part of each other, and more a part of our lives.

Click on the below image to view or download the full infographic.

Ciena 6500: Extreme Packet Makeover Edition

Bo Gowan — Tue May 14 10:10:00 PDT 2013

It’s time to rethink everything you know about Ciena’s 6500 Packet Optical Platform. You’ve known the 6500 as our flagship platform for next-gen optical transport, and for good reason. The winner of multiple industry awards over the last few years, the 6500 has been the driving force behind the industry’s coherent optical technology revolution, embedding Ciena WaveLogic technology to enable the wave of 40G and 100G deployments we are seeing around the world.

Today, the 6500 becomes much more than that.

This morning, Ciena has introduced significant new packet capabilities for the 6500 aimed at directly addressing the incredible growth of business Ethernet services and the inevitable convergence of the packet and optical layers of the network.

These new integrated packet-optical capabilities provide very efficient Ethernet aggregation and transport over an optical infrastructure, flattening the network and consolidating equipment needs by allowing Carrier Ethernet edge devices to network directly into the optical infrastructure. This means fewer devices to manage, lower power and space requirements, and faster, more automated turn-up and management of business Ethernet services -- from the network access to the metro core.

The details: New packet switching on the 6500

Today’s new packet capabilities come in two forms: new packet enabled cards for the 6500, and the integration of our packet operating system into the 6500.

Ciena’s Service Aware Operating System (SAOS) software is already ubiquitous across Ciena’s entire packet networking portfolio and deployed on more than 300,000 platforms worldwide. By extending SAOS onto the 6500, service providers can now seamlessly provision and manage carrier Ethernet services across our packet and 6500 families – from the network access to the metro core – using our OneControl unified management system.

Implementation of those packet service capabilities on the 6500 is enabled via Ciena’s new E-Suite packet modules, and include both blade-based packet switching modules for relatively modest footprint applications and fabric-based packet switching modules for higher density sites and mesh connectivity.

The E-Suite family

Within the E-Suite family, the blade-based packet switching cards, called our eMOTR cards, come in two versions: a dual-slot card optimized for GE services and a single-slot card optimized for 10G services.

In addition, a new eSw 4x10G card communicates directly with the central hybrid packet/OTN fabric, and allows co-resident packet and OTN switching in the same 6500 system.

The fabric-based Ethernet switch card is available today, with the eMOTR cards available in June.

A transformation for the 6500

Today’s new packet features further widen the flexibility of the 6500 platform as it continues its evolution from a pure optical transport platform when it was introduced almost a decade ago into what is now the industry’s most flexible packet-optical convergence portfolio.

It was less than two years ago that Ciena first announced integration of OTN switching capabilities for the 6500, as well as the extension of Ciena’s OneConnect optical control plane to the family (see Ciena unveils new packet-optical products, enhancements for intelligent infrastructure).

With today’s added packet switching capabilities, the transformation of the 6500 is truly complete. And it enables all this across the impressively diverse 6500 family that scales from 2-slot edge to 32-slot core and metro core versions.

A new metro reality

Of course, the concept of converged packet-optical isn’t necessarily new. The industry has been talking about it for years. What is new is the level of integration and flattening of the network that is now truly possible, especially in metro networks.

“The metro packet optical transport market is entering a new phase that focuses much more heavily on the packet side of packet-optical transport, and adds new innovations such as switched OTN and 100G,” said Heavy Reading senior analyst Sterling Perrin as part of today’s press release. “In this new metro environment, Ciena’s products and technology are clearly resonating well with customers. In our recent Metro Packet-Optical Transport 2.0 survey, Ciena was selected by operators as the global leader in technological superiority and innovation in metro packet-optical transport products.”

[Download the Heavy Reading Metro P-OTS survey]

That leadership in the eyes of our customers couldn’t come at a better time, as the industry’s service providers are now not just hoping for packet-optical convergence, they are expecting to deploy it. In a new survey of global service providers by Infonetics Research, nearly all operators stated their desire to integrate OTN and packet switching in the same platform by 2016.

Later this week, I’ll get into some of the more technical details of the new packet switching capabilities of the 6500. Until then, below is a new video on the E-Suite.

Ciena's little 3902 Carrier Ethernet switch wins big Cable award

Bo Gowan — Mon May 13 05:05:00 PDT 2013

One of Ciena’s smallest form factor products has just been given a big honor, being named as a Cable Spotlight Product of the Year Award Winner.

The product is Ciena’s 3902 Service Delivery Switch. Measuring under 6”x6” in size and weighing only half a pound, the 3902 can almost fit in your pocket. Given its ultra-small form factor, this Ethernet Business Services demarcation device can be discreetly placed just about anywhere on the customer premises.

Even though the 3902 is the smallest member of Ciena’s Packet portfolio, that doesn’t mean it is short on features. The 3902 offers a single port 10/100/1000Base-TX UNI, and a Gigabit Ethernet NNI with a variety of pluggable interface options for the flexibility to accommodate native Ethernet, Ethernet over TDM (T1/T3), and emerging EPON applications. The 3902 also supports Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) EPL, EVPL, and E-LAN service definitions.

Most importantly, it uses Ciena’s field-proven Service-Aware Operation System (SAOS). This enables the 3902 to be fully managed by our OneControl Unified Management System, a complete OAM suite that spans our entire Packet portfolio.

With SAOS, the 3902 turns into a plug-and-play device at the customer end-point, with auto service turn-up and provisioning enabled remotely by the centralized network management system in a matter of minutes (see the video below for a live demonstration of this).

This eliminates the need to have an onsite engineer for set-up at the customer premises, which can save $300 or more in the cost of a single deployment – a significant savings when you begin to scale to a large number of new customer locations.

For Cable MSOs, this combination of features, low-cost, remote turn-up and provisioning, and small form factor, fits perfectly in the growing SMB Ethernet Business Services market that the cable industry has been very successful in.

This isn’t the first time the 3902 has been recognized for its unique feature set. Last October the 3902 was honored as a Broadband Technology Report 4-diamond award winner (see Ciena 3902 nabs BTR Diamond Technology Award).

In the below video, Mervyn Kelly gives a live demonstration of “Instant Carrier Ethernet,” showing how Ciena's 3902 can be auto-configured over the network for simple plug-and-go set-up. In the demo, a factory-new device is plugged into the network and is up and running in under two minutes.

In the Lab: Instant Carrier Ethernet

For more information on the 3902, see the below resources:

On the hunt for 100G OpenFlow apps

Bo Gowan — Thu May 09 10:53:00 PDT 2013

Internet2 is on the hunt for new and innovative ways to apply SDN and OpenFlow standards across its 100G R&E network, and it’s willing to pay to find them. Yesterday in this press release, Internet2 announced a joint effort with Ciena, Juniper and Brocade to award cash prizes to the best open source end-user applications that make use of OpenFlow-enabled SDN capabilities of switches and controllers like those found on the Internet2 Network.

The program will provide grants of up to $10,000 for winning proposals, with the possibility of additional matching fund from Universities.

Ciena, Juniper and Brocade, all three of which provide networking gear for Internet2’s high-powered research and education network, are sponsors of the award program. Ciena, of course, provides the coherent 100G optical technology that powers the huge capacities for Internet2 and its members (see Internet2 shows what 8.8Tbps looks like).

“Fundamentally we want to be able to take advantage of the 100G and SDN-enabled capabilities of the Internet2 Advanced Layer 2 Service so a scientist can easily move petabytes of data without having to be a part-time network engineer,” said Eric Boyd, Internet2 Deputy CTO for Network Services, in an email interview. “Think drag-and-drop file transfer over 100G SDN.”

The invitation for proposals is open to all and runs through June 7^th. The best proposals will be selected to move forward towards the development of actual production-quality software. The program was created to encourage the development of next generation, open source applications that are of general interest to the R&E community and take advantage of the SDN and 100G capabilities in Internet2’s new next-gen computing architecture, the Innovation Platform.

The Innovation Platform was first unveiled last year as a 100G OpenFlow-enabled network for the R&E community. Earlier this week the University of Florida announced that it was the first university to fully implement the Innovation Platform concept.

The end goal of the app development program and cash prizes is to have the open applications available by September, 2013, a mere four months away. For more information visit the Internet2 program page and follow #innovativeappaward on Twitter.

Progress with OpenFlow: Much more than SDN-washing

Bo Gowan — Mon May 06 08:37:00 PDT 2013

I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia. I’ve seen too many errors, omissions and just plain bad pages to rely on it as a true source of information. But it can sometimes provide a perspective on hot topics of interest.

Take for example Wikipedia’s SDN page. It’s definition and background on SDN is innocuous enough at first glance, until you view the page history and realize this page – which was first created a mere six months ago – has already gone through 50 iterations by over 30 contributors. Indeed, the fervor over SDN seems to be everywhere – so much so that in a recent online chat on SDN hosted by Tech Target, there was an entire thread in the conversation about “SDN washing.”

To be sure, there is a ton of marketing going on these days around SDN from all angles, and it seems like every vendor in the industry has come out with their SDN vision in just the last few months. With all the hype, it’s easy to be the skeptic and cast every new SDN story into the bucket of marketing propaganda.

But there is also a lot of real work and progress going on in the SDN world as well. And much of that progress is happening in the Open Networking Foundation. The ONF is the organization that has taken over development of the OpenFlow protocol, an open standard for SDN that allows for centralized software-based control of a multi-vendor packet network.

Ciena has been a member of the ONF since its founding back in March 2011. As Ciena’s Chris Janz eloquently stated in a previous blog post, we see the ONF as a key epicenter of SDN innovation and discussion.

As such, Chris and his team have been highly active and committed to the ONF from the start. And we’ve been talking on this blog about the great work that’s been going on in the ONF since last year (see Ciena shows its OpenFlow stripes at ONF Plugfest). Our level of commitment to the ONF has recently increased even more, with the recent news that Ciena’s Lyndon Ong would be the Chair of the ONF’s newly formed Optical Transport Working Group.

The Optical Transport Working Group is charged with figuring out how to extend the benefits of SDN and OpenFlow to the optical network domain. This is, of course, a sweet spot for Ciena, where our vested interest and expertise in both packet and optical networks provides a real benefit.

The goals of the new Optical Transport group include identifying use cases, defining a target reference architecture for controlling optical transport networks incorporating the OpenFlow Standard, and identifying and creating OpenFlow protocol extensions. If all goes as planned, the group hopes to submit a set of recommendations and ONF protocol extensions by April 2014 (see the group’s complete Charter here - PDF).

The official formation as a Working Group is a graduation of sorts for the team, which was originally formed last September as a less formal Discussion Group, which Lyndon co-chaired. Members of the group include a variety of optical equipment vendors as well as service providers such as Verizon and DT.

And that list of participating service providers is only expected to grow for the new group, as the industry discussion around service provider use of OpenFlow and SDN has recently been taking center stage at events like the recent Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, CA. Our own Chris Janz has taken to this topic directly in his recent 2-part blog post on SDN for Service Providers (see part 1 and part 2).

[White Paper: The Power of Software in Ciena's OPⁿ Network Architecture]

In a recent interview with The Viodi View, Lyndon Ong talked about the interest from service providers in the new Optical Transport group: “Verizon has been the most active carrier participant in the OTWG, although DT and Telefonica participants have also attended some of the conference calls. More recently we have had representatives from Korea Telecom, Level 3 and NTT, so the number of carriers may increase now that we are an approved ONF Working Group.”

Lyndon Ong is Principal, Network Architecture in Ciena’s CTO organization. Dr. Ong, who received his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, has had an active career in design of control protocols, starting with the definition of Signaling System 7 standards, to working on VoIP transport and control protocols and finally the optical control plane. Dr. Ong has chaired groups in ITU-T Standards, in IETF, and been a Board member and Technical Committee Chair of OIF.

Lyndon’s appointment adds to the contributions that the Ciena team is making in the ONF, which now chairs two of the ONF’s eight working groups. Marc Cohn serves as Chair of the Market Education Committee (MEC), the outbound arm of the ONF. Ciena has been particularly active in the MEC, serving as the editor for a of the major publications, including the most recent Solution Brief on Network Monetization (editor: Mitch Auster) published in April.

The industry’s marketing machine is sure to keep churning out more SDN articles, SDN vision statements, and SDN hype. But behind the scenes it's the people and groups in the ONF that are making real progress on the future of SDN. A watchful eye on the progress of the ONF (and not Wikipedia) is a good bet for understanding the reality from the hype.

Today’s Enterprises Seeing an Increase in Network Security Threats

Mervyn Kelly, Marketing Director EMEA at Ciena — Tue Apr 30 05:17:00 PDT 2013

This is the third of a series of three posts on a Ciena-sponsored VansonBourne survey on enterprise connectivity in Western Europe. Mervyn Kelly is Ciena's Director of Field Marketing for the EMEA region. Other posts:

Today’s technology-intensive environment relies on communications networks to deliver information safely among individuals and organisations. Yet, as technology has become more complex, a recently released survey of over 400 IT decision makers amongst enterprises in Western Europe shows that threats against keeping information safe have also become more frequent, complex and pervasive. The survey, sponsored by Ciena, revealed that more than one-third of surveyed enterprises (36%) have experienced an increase in the frequency of network and data security-related incidents in the last 18 months.

The country most affected by the trend of increased security-related incidents is France, where nearly half (49%) of enterprises have noticed an increase in security threats; followed by Germany (40%), the UK (28%) and the Netherlands (25%). The most affected sector is utilities with over half of companies (54%) having mentioned an increase.

In my opinion, these results show that enterprises now need a comprehensive security approach to protect themselves from increasing security risks. This approach should find the right balance between three key elements: server security, at-rest encryption and in-flight encryption.

Currently, encryption of corporate devices and data at the application layer are the most popular encryption methods and are deployed by about half of surveyed organisations (53% and 48% respectively), while only approximately one-third of surveyed enterprises (36%) deploy in-flight encryption on the WAN links between sites and data centres. The adoption of in-flight encryption does vary by country, Germany is leading the way when it comes to in-flight WAN encryption, with about half (49%) of surveyed companies stating that they use in-flight encryption on WAN data link between sites or data centres. In contrast, in the Netherlands and France about a third of enterprises (36 and 33% respectively) have adopted in-flight encryption, and in the UK only about a quarter (24%).

Enterprises are underestimating the value of in-flight encryption; securing information stored in devices whilst running an unsecured network is a bit like locking all the windows in a house, but leaving the front door open. This view may be changing though, as more enterprises plan to start adopting the use of in-flight encryption in their networks. The Netherlands and Germany are expected to be the leaders of this effort in the near future. From the enterprises in these countries that are not currently deploying in-flight encryption, approximately one-third plan to adopt the method for the first time (36% and 31% respectively). When broken down by sector, transport (40%), finance (33%) and utility organisations (22%) are expected to lead the adoption of in-flight encryption.

The truth is, today’s network infrastructure is asked to do more than ever, whether supporting time-critical financial transactions, sensitive healthcare record storage, secure government communications, or simply wireless voice connections --- and all of this in an environment of increasing threats. So enterprises will have to continue to look to solutions that ensure the information travelling across their networks is secure, while still meeting the ever increasing demands on their network.

Read more in our Application Note: Wire-Speed Encryption Solution

Notes on the survey:
The research project surveyed 400 senior IT decision makers, including an equal number of participants from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and The Netherlands. 46% of the companies surveyed have more than 3,000 employees, 44% have between 1,000 and 3,000 employees, and 10% between 500 and 1,000. The online survey was conducted by VansonBourne in December 2012.

Delivering on fully open SDN for service providers

Chris Janz — Thu Apr 25 07:58:00 PDT 2013

Chris Janz is VP of Market Development at Ciena, and an industry-recognized authority on software-defined networking and cloud computing. In this second post in a two-part series, Chris explains how Ciena is delivering the expansively open SDN that service providers want.

In my post last week, I argued that expansive openness is perhaps the most critical attribute of SDN, in terms of delivering the values and capabilities that service providers are looking for. The point of SDN is to unleash productive innovation by making network behaviors more determined by software. This cannot happen if software systems are locked down by vendors or tied to specific network equipment or architectures.

I suggested that when it comes to SDN, expansive openness has 3 essential elements:

An open control layer architecture: modular, so modifiable
An open API from control layer “southbound” to equipment layer
An abstraction based API “northbound” from the control layer

I’d like to drill in on the 2^nd and 3^rd points above – commenting on the role of open APIs “north and south” in Ciena’s OPⁿ architecture.

Openness “southbound”

The control layer is one of two software layers in the SDN architecture, and the prospective home of many business impacting and differentiating features. As just one example: the control layer is the right place for analytical engines designed to drive optimization of network resource utilization under dynamic traffic loads.

Service providers want control of the features and functions of their control layers so they can differentiate their network service operations and delivery economics from those of their competitors. They will not have it unless their control layer can be designed and modified independently of the equipment layer.

This is why open API based programmability of physical networks by control layers is so important. OpenFlow – defined and championed by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) - remains the designed-for-purpose southbound open API protocol. Ciena is committed to delivering OpenFlow support on its equipment portfolio. I’ve blogged previously about Ciena’s demonstration of OpenFlow support at the most recent ONF Plugfest event (see Ciena shows its OpenFlow stripes at ONF Plugfest). There is more to come on this – stay tuned.

Additionally: OpenFlow is about to move beyond the world of packet. The ONF has recently chartered an Optical Transport Working Group to bring transport network control fully into the open SDN paradigm, and has selected Ciena’s Dr. Lyndon Ong to lead the Working Group. Service providers see potential to expand gains in network, and network operations, efficiencies if both packet and transport infrastructures can be brought under conjoint SDN based control.

Ciena has a history of leadership on conjoint packet and transport SDN. We publicly demonstrated OpenFlow driven, L2 & L1 conjoint network control in 2009, in partnership with researchers at Stanford University (Figure 1).

Openness “northbound”

I’ve said that the SDN control layer will be the home of many business impacting, software based innovations going forward. The same can be said of the second software layer in the SDN architecture: the business applications layer (see the canonical SDN architecture chart in my previous post).

In the service provider world, this layer is the home of revenue generating service application software. Efficient, high velocity service innovation – driven by application layer software creation – requires stable independence of the application layer from the control and equipment layers. The control and equipment layers should comprise a network platform from the application layer’s point of view – and application software should be fully portable from one such network platform to another.

This has strong implications regarding the nature of the API northbound from the control layer to business applications. The northbound API must not reflect or be tied to specific technologies, architectures or implementations of either control or equipment layers, as such reflections or ties would limit application portability. Abstraction is the key to stable separation of the software layers: business applications should request what they want from the network in highly abstracted terms. They should specify what to connect, and how – in strictly parametric terms: desired or required bandwidth, latency, quality, availability; when, and – potentially – at what acceptable price or cost.

It becomes the control layer’s job to deliver network services in response to such requests, efficiently and from available physical network resources. Business application software then remains stable regardless of how equipment layer resources may evolve on both fundamental architecture and available capacity levels, and irrespective of how control layer software may evolve in response.

Such an abstracted northbound API is already a feature of available Ciena software. The V-WAN network service module works with Ciena’s OneControl management system to provide for wide area network virtualization and abstraction, and for direct SW-to-SW dynamic binding with application layer systems (see Figure 2).

[White paper: V-WAN Virtualization and Automation]

V-WAN works with resource discovery and activation mechanisms contained in OneControl, and maintains a global, present- nd future-time “view” of available and potential network connection resources and their current, reserved and prospective allocations. It facilitates intelligent, dynamic allocation of such resources to requesting application software systems. Service requests, passed through a northbound API, use precisely the highly abstracted information language – what to connect; parametrically, how to connect – described above. That has proven in practice to greatly facilitate integration with a variety of application software systems, strictly minimizing churn as those systems may evolve or change.

With V-WAN’s abstracted northbound API and the introduction of OpenFlow capabilities in our portfolio, Ciena is helping service providers to take practical and navigable initial steps toward deployment of SDN oriented network platforms. We have a great deal more to come – so stay tuned to this space.

Infographic: You've had a cable cut...so what?

Bo Gowan — Wed Apr 24 07:47:00 PDT 2013

Cable cuts happen, both at sea and on land. The below Infographic gives the many ways cable cuts happen. Our GeoMesh solution creates a more resilient and responsive network that spans both submarine cable and terrestrial networks.

With a Ciena GeoMesh network, you can say "so what?" when you have a network cable cut, because you'll know that your network can handle it.

How do we know that Ciena's GeoMesh solution is the best way to protect your network from catastrophic terrestrial and subsea cable cuts? Because we have already proven it. In the below video, we detail how Ciena's GeoMesh solution helped keep critical communications networks up and running during a catastrophic natural disaster that resulted in multiple simultaneous cable cuts.