Monday, May 29, 2006

National LambdaRail Selects Calient for All-Optical Switching + GMPLS

National LambdaRail (NLR) awarded a multi-year supply agreement to Calient Networks for its all-optical switching systems and GMPLS technology.



The multi-year agreement anticipates deployment of two dozen of Calient's DiamondWave PXC systems at key junction nodes in the NLR national backbone and at Regional Optical Networks (RONs) interface points. A unique element of the agreement will allow for the partitioning of the PXC between RON and NLR activity, to significantly lower the cost of initial deployment and foster seamless network integration. This will also allow researchers to operate layer-1 switched virtual private networks with GMPLS networking capability.



Calient Networks said its optical switches will provide improved service availability with optical protection while dramatically reducing operation costs on the backbone network thanks to remote reconfiguration.

http://www.calient.nethttp://www.nlr.net

  • Calient's optical switches have also been deployed in Japan, including being a part of the Japanese Gigabit Network 2 (JGN2) backbone network. The Calient platforms are also deployed regionally in a number of accounts including MCNC and LONI in the US.


  • National LambdaRail (NLR) has reached fully-operational status, providing advanced optical, Ethernet and IP connectivity over more than 15,000 miles of fiber across the United States.

    The infrastructure provides researchers control over a nationwide network with up to 40 individual lightpaths running at 10 Gbps. The project is the result of over three years of work and nearly $100 million in funding by members.

    NLR's WaveNet, FrameNet, and PacketNet services are already in use by more than a dozen research projects, including the National Science Foundation-supported Extensible Terascale Facility and OptIPuter projects; the U.S. Department of Energy's UltraScience Net project; CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop's Pacific Wave project; the CAMERA project led by CalIT2, the Venter Institute and UCSD's CEOA; the University of Virginia-led CHEETAH project; as well as Internet2's Hybrid Optical Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project.


  • NLR has deployed nine Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing Systems across the country. The project is also using Cisco Systems' 15808 and 15454 optical transmission platforms.