ACADEMIA

National LambdaRail (NLR) and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) have agreed that CENIC would become the provider of Network Operations Center (NOC) services to NLR. NLR, which like CENIC is based in Southern California, is the nation’s premier advanced research communications network. It consists of over 12,000 miles of high performance optical fiber, linking research centers and government agencies across the country and capable of massive data transmission at speeds of up to 100 Gigabits per second. CENIC is among a group of regional optical networks that founded NLR in 2002, and provides connectivity to over 10,600 research and educational institutions throughout California. CENIC has provided NOC services at the optical layer to NLR since the latter’s inception. Under the new, enhanced partnership between the two organizations, CENIC will now also provide switch, router, and engineering support desk NOC services.

“As a founding member of NLR, CENIC is excited to be assuming responsibility for the entire NLR Network Operations Center," said CENIC Chief Executive Officer, Louis Fox. "Providing this support will further our mutual interest in serving needs of the research community, including California's world class research universities, as well as those of over 200 research universities across the country that depend upon NLR.”

“It makes perfect sense for NLR and CENIC to work more closely together,” said NLR’s Chairman and CEO, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, as he also welcomed the new agreement. “An expanded partnership will enable us to provide ever better service to the research and education community, to support all scientific research in our nation and in particular to support the massive data demands that genomic medicine will create as it transforms healthcare in the country.”

The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health announced in July 2011 that it had committed some $100 million to NLR and would equip the network as the backbone of a “national health intranet” linking research centers and hospitals with genomic sequencing and high performance computing capabilities and dedicated medical data storage capacity, “bringing the power of supercomputing to the point of care.”