One of the country's premier private higher education and research institutions, Northwestern University aims to provide its students a highly collaborative academic experience by enabling a diverse set of advanced applications such as Grid computing and video-based distance learning, while pioneering large-scale science and technology research projects.

To support those initiatives, Northwestern University's Information Technology team is deploying Ciena's CN 4200 RS with ROADM functionality to support all network traffic aggregation between its Evanston and Chicago campus locations, as well as production applications such as data replication for storage back-up. Additionally, the network supports connectivity to StarLight, an advanced networking facility supported by the National Science Foundation and located on the downtown Chicago campus of Northwestern, leveraging a scalable, standards-based architecture that allows the University to react to the evolving needs and demands of its researchers.

"Our communications efforts require dynamic networks that can resiliently access and transfer bandwidth-intensive data and computing resources to enable real-time collaboration regionally or nationally. But we must have an infrastructure that remains agile enough to handle smaller, daily bandwidth demands for our more than 90 school-based centers and 20 interdisciplinary research centres", stated Tim Ward, associate director of Telecommunications and Network Services at Northwestern University. "Ciena has helped provide a flexible network infrastructure to meet our current traffic growth requirements while creating an architecture that is capable of supporting any future network expansions and service needs."

With the ability to aggregate and distribute thousands of on-demand programmable services from a single platform, Ciena's CN 4200 RS is ideally suited to support dynamic provisioning of high-bandwidth connectivity. The platform enables computing-intensive research between geographically separate locations for scientific computing applications, cluster processing and transfers of large data sets, some in excess of one terabyte. This allows for high-performance network transport with rapid provisioning, no packet loss and the lowest latency possible. In addition, Ciena's CN 4200 ROADM enables mesh connectivity for any-to-any routing, ensuring high availability and shared protection paths to maximize network efficiency and resource utilization.

"As today's research and education networks evolve to support advanced applications, it is increasingly important that networks remain agile and adaptive", stated Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena. "Ciena's technology portfolio, including our dynamic CN 4200 ROADM, and continued collaboration with leading institutions in the research networking community, makes us an ideal partner for these environments, proven in our history of success in providing the global research and education community robust, automated networks that minimize cost and complexity."