Ciena Builds Advanced Network for NOAA Environmental Research

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noaaToday Ciena announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is building a private optical network powered by the company’s converged packet optical platforms. As part of its ongoing mission to connect researchers to the data and resources needed to advance environmental science, the new 100G network will connect four geographically dispersed facilities in the Washington, D.C. metro area, including McLean, Va. and Suitland, Silver Spring and College Park, Md.

NOAA is an innovative agency of science, stewardship and service with scope and responsibility ranging from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sun,” said Robert Sears, Chief IT Manager at NOAA/OAR/ESRL-DO. “NOAA scientists use cutting-edge research and high-tech instrumentation to provide citizens, planners, emergency managers and other decision makers with reliable information. NOAA’s networks need to be inline with, if not ahead of, the scientific innovation in order to enable NOAA’s mission. The Ciena 6500 platform will help us create a reliable, agile next-generation infrastructure that plays a significant role in our ability to support advanced environmental scientific research and discovery.”

The new network will enable NOAA to support bandwidth-intensive applications and programs such as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite series R (GOES-R), and the next-generation national weather observation satellite program, which is working to advance weather and climate science and services.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts. Its N-Wave science network, initially founded via funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a national spanning network that provides intra-NOAA connectivity, including communication and data transfer (5 Petabytes per month) between NOAA programs, line offices, research facilities and other scientific centers across CONUS, Alaska and Hawaii.

Through a competitive procurement process and deployment of the Ciena packet-optical platform, NOAA in the D.C. Metropolitan area can consolidate its network and make it more efficient. The enhanced network will give researchers greater access to large volumes of complex climate and weather data, helping scientists collaborate and transfer information without constraint. It will also allow the administration to economically and flexibly provide bandwidth to support new scientific research and applications like next generation satellite programs that monitor weather data/activity across the globe.

Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform will help NOAA address increased bandwidth demands and provide high-capacity interconnectivity between locations, giving NOAA researchers instant access to the weather-related data they need.

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