Dec 18, 2024

Major CENIC Line System Upgrade Means Improved Provisioning and Services for CENIC Members

Readers of CENIC blog articles and news announcements will be aware of the progress of our activities to upgrade the California Research and Education Network (CalREN), ensuring that our member community will always have access to the most up-to-date networking, services, and support. This has included an overview of our upgrade program to 400 Gbps and beyond, 400 Gbps backbone handoffs at major backbone hubsites, network automation at CENIC, and testing and validation of coherent pluggable optics—all of which will enable CENIC to provide improved networking and service provisioning with less equipment and power than ever before.

And now, CENIC is pleased to announce an important milestone with the completed upgrade of the Los Angeles-to-Emeryville optical backbone to the Cisco NCS1010 open line system. This platform is built with flexibility in mind, greatly simplifying flex-grid circuit deployments, troubleshooting, and management over the previous Cisco NCS2000 series. Cisco Optical Network Controller (CONC) is being deployed for next-generation Layer 1 monitoring and management capabilities, with service turn-up taking place during the first half of the 2025 calendar year.

Cisco NCS1010 Open Line System Improves Optical Management and Service Flexibility

The features of the NCS1010 open line system will greatly improve optical deployments, flexibility, management, and service turn-up and migration for CENIC member institutions. The NCS1010 supports a wide range of digital coherent optics and transponders thanks to ingress EDFA, which permits an optical signal to be directly amplified without first converting it to an electrical signal. The NCS1010 also runs Cisco’s IOS XR network operating system, enabling the rich XR automation and telemetry support to extend to the DWDM photonic line system. Line segments can also be turned up automatically with embedded software, and better equalization and performance is made possible with built-in dynamic gain equalization and an in-line amplifier.

Additionally, service turn-up, migration, and improved throughput is made possible thanks to built-in ASE loading and seamless (“hitless”) migration to designs that make use of a broader band of usable wavelengths of light that can carry data along a single optical fiber.

“CENIC is very pleased to announce this major leap forward in optical provisioning and monitoring,” said Fady Bekhit, the CENIC optical domain Network Architect who completed the upgrade. “Not only does Cisco’s NCS1010 line system offer all of the advantages above, but CONC improves the configuration of optical path parameters and power consumption, and makes it much easier to provision new services. Its Optical Time Domain Reflection (OTDR) capabilities also enable us to diagnose, pinpoint, and respond to fiber cuts and other service interruptions.”

And as Bekhit and fellow CENIC engineering team member Alaa Shaheen explained during our Biennial Conference in Monterey, CA during March 2024, these and other backbone upgrades will help improve the backbone’s equipment, power, and carbon footprint markedly while vastly improving network capacity, services, and support.

CENIC’s engineering team is currently in the process of upgrading the CalREN Inland Route between Riverside and Sacramento to the NCS1010 platform, with the Southern Route planned for 2025-26. As with all enhancements to networking, services, and support, we will keep our members informed via our bimonthly newsletter and our website.

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