JUNE 18, 2007 -- Ciena Corp. (search for Ciena) has announced the CN 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, the latest expansion of the company's flagship CN 4200 family of products and its FlexSelect Architecture vision for flexible, service-enabled transport. With the ability to aggregate and distribute thousands of on-demand programmable services from a single platform, the CN 4200 RS is designed for telco and cable service providers, large enterprises, research and education (R&E) institutions, and government organizations to deploy in locations that require massive service aggregation and wavelength routing, such as high-density metro offices, data centers and head-ends.
Delivering the same combination of on-demand programmable service delivery, G.709 OTN-based service transparency, and intelligent service-level management as the CN 4200, the CN 4200 RS offers four times the capacity of the original four-slot CN 4200 while sharing the same hardware architecture, software, and management system to maximize investment protection, the company says. Generally available, Ciena's CN 4200 RS has already been selected for deployment by a major European operator as well as multiple existing CN 4200 customers, Ciena asserts.
"As optical networking technology evolves, operators are assessing their optical networking systems not just on performance but increasingly on the flexibility of these systems. Flexibility -- including software programmability, sub-wavelength grooming, and universal line cards -- is the hallmark of the CN 4200," said Sterling Perrin, senior analyst with Heavy Reading. "Driven by high-bandwidth, packet-based applications -- such as residential video -- we are seeing demand for higher and higher capacities in metro and regional hubs. The CN 4200 RS addresses these unprecedented capacity requirements."
The CN 4200 RS chassis features 16 line card slots and up to 96 ports per chassis with scalability to more than 5,000 ports in a single node. By increasing capacity and lowering cost per port, the CN 4200 RS expands the addressable market for the CN 4200 family in terms of network locations and applications with the capacity and features optimized to support video distribution, broadband aggregation, wireless backhaul, managed business services, and other applications, Ciena says. In addition, the recently announced FlexSelect 40G Shelf can be integrated with the CN 4200 RS for delivering in-service upgrades of granular 40G wavelengths to existing 10G networks.
"The success of the CN 4200 family -- driven by Ciena's FlexiPort technology -- underscores the growing importance of software automation and reprogrammable hardware to provide competitive differentiation at the initial purchase as well as to solidify network incumbency as services evolve," said Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena. "With large customers stacking multiple CN 4200s at locations where they needed large channel counts to keep pace with services growth, the creation of the CN 4200 RS was driven by customer demand for a bigger, denser chassis to maximize CN 4200's flexible packet optical benefits in a scalable platform that leverages the same hardware, software and management system to drastically reduce costs."
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