West Coast network peering facility leverages Ciena’s coherent technology across the Internet2 backbone to support data-intensive research and education efforts

HANOVER, MD — 11/13/2012

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that the Pacific Wave international network peering facility—which connects research and education (R&E) networks in 40 countries in the Pacific Rim and beyond—was recently upgraded with Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with WaveLogic™ coherent optical processors. This deployment will provide 100Gb/s networking capabilities to Pacific Wave’s extensive R&E network infrastructure across the western coast of the United States, from Los Angeles to Seattle.

The 100G backbone now connecting Pacific Wave’s major peering locations will not only provide regional and national high-speed connectivity between higher education and research institutions throughout the U.S. Pacific Coast, but will also allow R&E institutions around the world to collaborate more quickly and effectively in data-intensive, international sciences such as astronomy, oceanography, high-energy physics, and genomics.

In choosing Ciena for this deployment, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) –who together operate Pacific Wave as a joint project – are ensuring that Pacific Wave is consistent with the recent Internet2 and the US Department of Energy (ESnet) 100G backbone upgrades.

Key Facts:

• Pacific Wave is a distributed international peering facility that enables R&E networks to share traffic at any of five locations in three cities: Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle. Current network participants are located throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Qatar, Singapore, South America, Taiwan, and the United States. Connectivity to Europe is further facilitated via peering with StarLight Chicago.

• The Pacific Wave peering facility’s West Coast backbone will be powered by Ciena’s coherent technology, a critical component of the company’s OPn architecture, to provide significant scale and capacity to support the increasing bandwidth requirements of large-scale e-science, distributed computing, and storage applications.

• In addition, the network supports ESnet’s On-Demand Secure Circuits and Reservation System (OSCARS) that enables the dynamic provisioning of multi-domain, high-bandwidth virtual circuits that provide bandwidth and service guarantees to support research applications and has the potential to incorporate software defined networking in the future.

• Ciena’s 6500 allows Pacific Wave’s West Coast backbone to ride on the Internet2 backbone as a fully separated “virtual wave,” capturing the benefits of a private fiber network at a fraction of the cost through managed spectrum.

• Funded through grants from the National Science Foundation to the University of New Mexico, the Pacific Wave network will also provide advanced broadband network capabilities, services, content, and applications, expanding the use of the Internet2 network in the western United States and enabling new capabilities to participants in CENIC, PNWGP, and Internet2 R&E networks. 

Executive Comments:

• “Now more than ever, research and education efforts require high speed networks that can quickly and reliably transfer massive amounts of data and applications over greater distances. Ciena’s coherent optical solutions provide the economical and exponential growth in bandwidth requirements required to support data-intensive, collaborative research projects so that scientists can conduct experiments, investigate, and collaborate with peers in new and innovative ways.”
  – Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research, Ciena 

• “This upgrade is the latest step forward in Pacific Wave’s long history of advanced approaches to Layer 2 networking. The 100G upgrade to the Pacific Wave backbone will help empower the next revolution in global scientific collaboration and Science DMZ-model research networking. Ciena’s impressive track record in high-speed fiber-optic network builds makes them a welcome ally in our mission to ensure that California research and education benefits fully from advanced networking and the innovation it enables.”
  – Louis Fox, President & CEO, CENIC

• “This 100G upgrade to Pacific Wave enables new research along one of the most vital corridors in the West.”
  – Dr. Gil Gonzales, Principal Investigator, University of New Mexico

• “With this new 100G West Coast upgrade for Pacific Wave, plus the 10G Northern Wave peering connection between PacWave in Seattle and StarLight in Chicago, PNWGP is delighted to be taking part in what amounts to a massive advance in research networking throughout North America. This is truly 21st century networking, made possible by organizations that work together for a common goal.”
  – Amy Philipson, Executive Director, PNWGP 

•  “Providing America’s leading universities with access to the most advanced network technology and increasing the global capacity for advanced science collaboration among our members and their partners is critical to Internet2. We are proud to work with our partners at CENIC, PNWGP and Ciena to support our members in accelerating scientific discovery and providing access to advanced technologies to the public through our nation’s community anchor institutions.”
  – Rob Vietzke, Vice President of Network Services, Internet2 

Supercomputing 2012:

• Ciena is participating in several demonstrations at the SC Conference 2012 (SC12), in Salt Lake City, November 12-15. To learn more about the Pacific Wave network, visit CENIC and PNWGP at SC12 booth #3647.

Technology Background:

• The pioneer and market leader in coherent technology for optical transmission, Ciena has to date shipped over 16,000 coherent 40G/100G line interfaces to more than 100 customers across the globe, with over 15 million coherent kilometres deployed worldwide. Ciena has a long standing commitment to the research and education sector and powers several of the world’s largest research networks include Internet2 (US); ESnet (US); SURFnet (Netherlands), RENATER (France), CANARIE (Canada), and JANET (UK).

• OPn is Ciena’s approach for building open, programmable next-generation networks that scale and automatically adapt to handle the changes created by cloud/data center migration, mobile broadband and the growing demand for high-bandwidth applications and services including those that support R&E efforts across the globe.

Supporting Resources and Multimedia:

• Application Note: Coherent Optical Processing for High-Capacity Networks
• Data Sheet: 6500 Packet-Optical Platform
• White Paper: Addressing Network Uncertainty with an Intelligent Infrastructure
• Video: 100G and Beyond for Research and Education Networks
• White Paper: OPn Network Architecture

About CENIC
California’s education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions are onnected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and educators are engaged. For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

About Pacific Northwest Gigapop
The Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) is a not-for-profit organization whose team brought the original internet to the northwest in the 80’s, and which today provides the full range of cost-effective, reliable, broadband high-performance networking, interconnection and peering, and related collaboration mechanisms, needed to help support the missions of our diverse membership, including the research, education, medical, cultural, government and leading technology organizations throughout the pacific-northwestern USA and also internationally across the Pacific Rim via Pacific Wave. For more information, visit http://www.pnw-gigapop.net/.

About Internet2
Internet2® is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. For more information, visit www.internet2.edu. 

About Ciena
Ciena 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 OPn, its approach for building open 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. We routinely post recent news, financial results and other important announcements and information about Ciena on our website. For more information, visit www.ciena.com.

Note to Ciena Investors
Forward-looking statements. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena’s actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-Q, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 5, 2012. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena’s expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “should,” “will,” and “would” or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Press Contacts:
Nicole Anderson
Ciena Corporation
(877) 857 -7377
pr@ciena.com

Investor Contacts:
Gregg Lampf
Ciena Corporation
(877) 243 6273
ir@ciena.com

Jamie Moody
Ciena Corporation
(214) 995-8035
jmoody@ciena.com

Janis Cortese
CENIC
(714) 220-3454
jcortese@cenic.org