DOE's ESnet selects Infinera for 100GbE services

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) on Wednesday launched 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services with Infinera's (Nasdaq: INFN) DTN platform.

This is not a built-from-scratch deployment. ESnet will use the existing equipment it already installed from the Sunnyvale, Calif., vendor to offer 100GbE services from DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory to data centers in Manhattan and back onto ESnet's nationwide network.

Brookhaven is a key piece of the DOE research as it is one of the two facilities in the United States making data from the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment that is available to the 44 U.S. institutions participating in the ATLAS project in addition to DOE scientists and collaborators. ATLAS has been developed to detect particles created by the proton-proton collisions as part of the search for the Higgs boson, a particle which may be the source of mass for all matter.

A key element of this deployment and the earlier test ESnet conducted with Infinera is a focus on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and control plane. During a trial in November, ESnet and Infinera demonstrated transport Software Defined Networking on ESnet's test bed.

After deploying the DTN platform to assess what Greg Bell, ESnet's director, said were "potentially disruptive technologies like ARCHSTONE multi-layer networking and Layer2 OpenFlow" on a dark fiber ring on Long Island, the company decided "to continue to deploy the same DTN platform for our 100GbE production network on Long Island."

Infinera's win with ESnet, like other contracts it won recently with traditional service providers such as CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Colt (LSE: COLT.L), illustrates that it can compete as a sound competitor to strong optical players such as Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN).

Now that it has proven itself with ESnet, Infinera has the necessary leverage needed to upsell ESnet its latest DTN-X platform if needed at a later date.

As of the end of Q3 2012, Infinera had signed 16 customers for the DTN-X platform.

For more:
- see the release

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