The Pacific Wave Peering Exchange continues to expand

Pacific Wave International Exchange and its peering and science DMZ fabrics will be extended to Texas’s Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) and Oklahoma’s OneNet thanks to support from the National Science Foundation.

The Pacific Wave SDX, which is a project of the Corporation for Education Networking in California (CENIC) and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), is an integral component of the international effort to interconnect research and education networks using Software Defined Networking (SDN).  Pacific Wave operates multiple open exchange peering points available at three U.S. Pacific coast locations, including the Bay Area (Sunnyvale and Palo Alto), Los Angeles (three sites), and Seattle; three U.S. interior locations in Denver, Albuquerque, and El Paso; and two sites in Tokyo, Japan. It comprises multiple, geographically diverse 100Gbps connections – in Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago – to Internet2’s backbone nodes and full range of advanced network capabilities. Pacific Wave also operates an SDX testbed with access points in Los Angeles, Seattle and Sunnyvale, and including teaming relationships with StarLight, WIDE/T-REX and others to pilot more global interoperability of next-generation SDX capabilities.

LEARN and OneNet will connect to Pacific Wave via the Western Regional Network (WRN). WRN is an R&E extension of Pacific Wave, created and supported by a collaboration of the major Western Regional R&E optical networks: Front Range Gigapop (CO and WY), New Mexico Gigapop, University of Hawaii, Pacific Northwest Gigapop (WA, AK, MT, ND) and CENIC (CA). WRN employs a dedicated 100Gbps wavelength-based network infrastructure, including “dark channels” provided by Internet2, that spans the West and also reaches Pacific Wave’s international exchange point collaborator, StarLight, in Chicago, thereby making most European R&E networks directly accessible to WRN participants.