Internet2 FiberCo, a fiber holding company formed to support dark fiber initiatives for U.S. research and higher education, and Ciena Corporation, the network specialist, today announced that the companies have teamed to offer a suite of customized professional services and optical networking equipment solutions to assist Internet2 members with planning, installing, and managing their advanced network infrastructures. Through the agreement, Internet2 members will be able to choose Ciena's industry-leading products and services to support the development of regional optical infrastructures that can reliably sustain the most 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," said 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 will offer Ciena's basic and professional services to provide Internet2 members end-to-end solutions 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 wide range of products within Ciena's FlexSelect Architecture to provide optical transport and switching capabilities that enable dynamic Ethernet lightpath connectivity. These product offerings include the CN 4200T FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, the CoreDirector Multiservice Optical Switch, the CN 2000R 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," said 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 leading institutions in the research networking community, including numerous initiatives with Internet2 members like the advancement of optical control plane technologies and scalability to 100G 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.