GAMING

France’s RENATER utilizes new regional features in national mesh WDM network to support research and education applicationsCiena Corporation today announced that RENATER, the national research and education network in France, has chosen the CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to create a proprietary mesh WDM network spanning the entire country. The project, RENATER 5, showcases Ciena’s CN 4200 regional and long-haul transport capabilities, which expand the platform’s geographical range to more than 1500 kilometres.

RENATER was originally deployed in the early 1990s to connect universities and research centers throughout France. Today, RENATER connects more than 1000 sites across the country and beyond via campus, metropolitan and regional networks. As part of the RENATER 5 project, the organization replaced both leased bandwidth and its point-to-point WDM backbone with a national meshed WDM network linking all of its points of presence (PoPs) in France.

Following a rigorous public procurement process, the organization selected Ciena’s CN 4200 platform for its optical robustness to cope with long distances on a national level, its flexibility allowing for seamless re-assignment of bandwidth, and its automated control plane functionality that enables end-to-end provisioning.

“Our aim in the RENATER 5 project is to create a resilient, flexible and highly secure optical network that enables us to easily modify bandwidth assignments. With many research projects only requiring temporary access to high-bandwidth services, the ability to assign capacity without excessive outlay of time and workloads is absolutely instrumental. Based on the resiliency and reliability that we achieved in previous RENATER projects with Ciena’s CN 4200, we had no doubt that the platform’s extended reach features and mesh capabilities best fit our network requirements,” said Dany Vandromme, general manager, RENATER.

The new extended reach features of Ciena’s CN 4200 platform deployed in the RENATER 5 project are aimed at bridging the gap between traditional metro and ultra long-haul platforms. With the use of high-performance amplifiers, transceiver enhancements and advanced software features, Ciena can dramatically extend the maximum distances between network nodes to more than 1500 kilometres, or more than double its previous transport distance capabilities. At the same time, the new version of the CN 4200 platform is equipped with all the market-leading functionality of its original, metro-oriented sibling: full service transparency (bits going in equal bits coming out), performance monitoring for Ethernet and SONET/SDH services, as well as industry-first software-programmable ports.

"Service providers are using more multi-reach transport systems across metro and regional networks to deliver their growing video and data services," said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "As the lines blur between metro, regional and long-haul networks, service providers are turning to multi-reach products, such as Ciena's CN 4200 platform, which have long-haul transport capabilities combined with the service flexibility and lower cost points of a metro WDM platform. Carriers like a single platform for ease of service delivery and management." 

"As the changing economics of the telecoms industry forces carriers to re-evaluate how best to lower the network cost and optimize its performance, they are turning to metro-oriented transport solutions to facilitate traffic,” said Francois Locoh-Donou, vice president and general manager of Ciena in the EMEA region. “The CN 4200’s extended reach capabilities are squarely aimed at helping network operators make this transition. RENATER’s deployment is the first project of this kind to be announced globally, and is an excellent example of our flagship platform’s new features and capabilities.”

RENATER previously deployed Ciena’s CN 4200 through its metropolitan area network across Paris in 2007, providing 10 Gbps connections to aid local research and collaboration. For more information about Ciena’s CN 4200 Family, please visit: http://www.ciena.com/products_cn4200_overview.htm.