Oct 25, 2021

Progress Towards “Future-Proofing” CENIC’s Network

CENIC engineers have completed validation of an important component of its Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) upgrade for its network. This initial upgrade focused on the select hub sites of Los Angeles and Sunnyvale and marks significant progress in modernizing CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN).

In support of CENIC’s new spectrum service offering, engineers worked creatively to overcome obstacles posed by the ongoing pandemic including remote collaboration and supply chain slowdowns. The team successfully augmented the spectrum termination capabilities in Los Angeles and in Sunnyvale by 16 flexible grid capable ports, each with the capacity to terminate services between 100G and 800G. This new infrastructure is capable of supporting colorless, directionless, and contentionless (CDC) technologies, which are prerequisites for enabling software provisioning in the optical layer.

CENIC initially validated this infrastructure by bringing up a 500G optical channel between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale over a 650 km (approximately 404 mile) distance. CENIC operates its line system as an open line system and validated the infrastructure for multi-vendor support by bringing up the 500G channel using transponder edge equipment that is alien to the native optical system.

Among the initial users of the Los Angeles and Sunnyvale enhanced infrastructure will be the Pacific Wave Exchange, a joint National Science Foundation-funded project of CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop that connects Asia-Pacific and Oceania research and education networks to North American research and education networks and major commercial research cloud services. Its members will benefit from increased backbone capacity via the spectrum service available through CENIC’s flexible grid and CDC enabled optical line system.

“This upgrade is an important demonstration of the creativity and skill of our engineers who are committed to providing network capacity and capabilities for our US research community to serve tomorrow’s needs today,” said Louis Fox, CENIC President & CEO.

The Next Generation Infrastructure upgrade is a complex endeavor for a network at the scale of CalREN and has required extensive research, planning, and evaluation by many highly skilled individuals from CENIC’s engineering and operations teams. When fully complete in 2022, the NGI will enable greater network capacity, flexibility, and resiliency; more efficient and environmentally friendly use of resources; and, access to additional cloud computing and other on-demand solutions.

Similar upgrades and augmented performance are planned through 2022 for hub locations in Oakland, Sacramento, Riverside, and San Diego.

Related blog posts

CENIC AIR and Your Campus: From Concept to Connection

Learn more about how to get started thinking about how your campus can connect to and use the CENIC AI Resource.

CENIC Network Automation Update: New Network-Source-of-Truth Tool Implemented

CENIC has evaluated and worked with various DCIM platforms to meet this need and concluded that NetBox was the best fit for its environment as its Network Source of Truth.