MAY 1, 2007 -- Internet2 FiberCo, a fiber holding company formed to support dark fiber initiatives for U.S. research and higher education, and Ciena Corp. (search for Ciena) today announced that the companies have teamed to provide a suite of customized professional services and optical networking equipment to assist Internet2 (search for Internet2) members with planning, installing, and managing their advanced network infrastructures.
Per the agreement, Internet2 members will be able to choose Ciena's products and services to support the development of regional optical infrastructures to deliver leading-edge network applications and services.
"The research and education community continues to evolve their network infrastructures to take advantage of the latest advances in optical networking that can support the most high-performance network applications and experimentation," reports Linda Roos, project manager of Internet2 FiberCo. "FiberCo's new agreement with Ciena builds on our community's longstanding partnership with the company and provides our members more flexibility and choices to meet their network development and management needs."
FiberCo says it will offer Ciena's basic and professional services to provide Internet2 members with end-to-end equipment and support for any and all components of their dynamic research networks, including network management and maintenance. The range of offerings includes network architecture and design, installation, vendor-neutral engineering support, staging and implementation services, and program management.
Additionally, FiberCo can offer Internet2 members a range of products within Ciena's FlexSelect Architecture (search for FlexSelect), including the CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, the CoreDirector Multiservice Optical Switch, the CN 2000 Storage and LAN Extension Platform, and the CoreStream Agility Optical Transport System.
"A partner to the research and education community for more than a decade, Ciena remains focused on advancing technology that can meet the evolving connectivity needs of research networks," contends Jeff Verrant, director of research and education initiatives at Ciena. "Our collaboration with FiberCo strategically extends our solutions to members of the Internet2 community to support the advancement of next-generation, high-performance networking, while providing a flexible foundation to meet network challenges in the future."
The new FiberCo partnership extends Ciena's collaboration with the research networking community, including numerous initiatives with Internet2 members such as the advancement of optical control plane technologies and scalability to 100-Gigabit connectivity and beyond.
FiberCo has arranged with Ciena to provide pricing for these network design and implementation services, which can be tailored to fit individual customer needs, say the companies.
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