National LambdaRail chooses Cisco's ONS 15454 for optical network upgrade

JULY 10, 2008 -- National LambdaRail (search for National LambdaRail), a consortium of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, today announced that it has chosen the Cisco (search for Cisco) ONS 15454 (search for ONS 15454) DWDM system for its strategic Internet Protocol next-generation network (IP NGN) upgrade. NLR says its nationwide optical infrastructure, used extensively by the research community in the U.S., will benefit by having more reliable services and future enhancements to higher capacity and faster speeds in line with emerging standards. 

"The Cisco ONS 15454 platform gives NLR users a great advantage," contends Grover Browning, NLR's director of engineering and leader of the evaluation team. "Because the Cisco equipment has an extended-reach capability and is much less expensive to deploy, we can lower the barriers of optical networking access and encourage researchers to utilize fast network pipes. We evaluated vendors across the DWDM spectrum and chose Cisco as the complete solution--offering low cost, great reliability, and proven technical features--paired with a corporate commitment to our academic community." 

"The high-bandwidth, data-intensive applications that characterize many of NLR's larger customers makes its infrastructure an ideal environment to showcase the performance and integrity of Cisco's optical transport platform," adds Surya Panditi, vice president and general manager of Cisco access and transport technology group, which includes the Cisco optical business unit. "We are proud of our long-standing partnership with National LambdaRail, and its selection of our ONS 15454 is evidence of our solution's strength, value, and our vision of how IP transport will evolve." 

"The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP platform also provides NLR with an industry-leading, IP next-generation network transport solution capable of supporting IP-over-DWDM architecture and scaling in-service up to 40-gigabits-per-second and up to100 gigabits DWDM," Panditi continues.

The defining characteristic of the NLR infrastructure is its ability to support many distinct networks for the U.S. research community using the same core infrastructure. The planned upgrade will involve the northern tier of NLR covering 6,349 route miles-- from Los Angeles through Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., to Jacksonville, FL. 

According to Cisco, the ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) is a DWDM system that features two- through eight-degree reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (search for ) technology that enables wavelength provisioning across entire networks and eliminates the need for optical-to-electrical-to-optical (OEO) transponder conversions. The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP interconnects with Layer 2, Layer 3, and storage area network (SAN) devices at rates up to 40 Gbits/sec. It delivers any service type to any network location and supports all DWDM topologies.

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