Research and education organizations can now accelerate development of dynamic and on-demand end user control of network resources for high performance network applications

Ciena today announced that the company’s Dynamic Resource Allocation Controller (DRAC), intelligent middleware for provisioning dynamic on-demand lightpaths across different networks, has been released as open source software. By publicly publishing the source code, individuals and organizations in the research and education community can collaboratively contribute and evolve the software to support the advanced networking requirements of scientific researchers worldwide.

With scientific data sources, storage facilities, computational resources and collaborators often distributed across a variety of sites, DRAC provides guaranteed network services to end users through a web-based portal to connect them. The software abstracts the network resources for a user or application resulting in point-and-click activation of network services across the network and automating the provisioning across multiple network layers and domains. SURFnet, the organization that runs the national research and education network (NREN) of the Netherlands, has deployed DRAC on its network since 2008 and collaborated with Ciena on its development based on the scientific research networking needs of the more than 150 institutions in the research and education community that SURFnet connects.

“While scientific research used to happen primarily within a faculty or even individually, we today see that our users are collaborating with colleagues across the globe using high definition video conferencing while receiving large amount of data from scientific instruments and pulling multi-terabyte data sets from storage facilities, and analyzing them using supercomputers across different networks on different continents,” said Erik-Jan Bos, CTO at SURFnet. “DRAC plays a key role in turning a multi-technology hybrid network into a dynamic network service that is schedulable to the needs of the user removing network obstacles on the path to scientific discovery.”

In addition to SURFnet, a number of research and education networks and users are currently identifying ways to further enhance and deploy DRAC to optimize the management and access of network resources for bandwidth-intensive applications. For example, laboratories and scientific institutions that have large amounts of scientific data spread out in different databases are now able to connect these systems and have the ability to share and transfer large amounts of data – which is needed for various tasks including data extraction and analysis – in real-time instead of previous methods of physically shipping large data files back and forth.

“From 100G to intelligent optical switching, we have always worked closely with the research and education community to deliver high performance networking solutions to connect researchers, data and computing resources spread around the world into essentially a ‘virtual’ laboratory,” said Steve Alexander senior vice president and chief technology officer at Ciena. “Our work with SURFnet to virtualize network resources is another example of our focus on meeting the needs of customers in this market and open sourcing DRAC’s development will expedite its ability to optimize dynamic services to meet the networking needs of globally-distributed researchers.”

For additional information on Ciena’s collaboration with the research and education community, please visit: http://www.ciena.com/researchandeducation.