Ciena has joined the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project that supports “at scale” research in networking, distributed systems, cloud services, security, and novel applications.
GENI provides access to hundreds of widely distributed resources, including virtual machines and “bare-machines.” The company said that by connecting GENI’s multi-site cloud computing resources with its testbed, its researchers’ gain greater ability to collaborate with external researchers via a multi-directional interconnected system to test new applications on a large scale network and give assurance of their real-world viability. For example, this can be used to test new network function virtualization (NFV) applications like virtual WAN optimization or network security.
“Ciena’s collaboration with the National Science Foundation’s GENI project will help drive continued exploration of advanced network enabled applications and support the creation of more programmable, agile networks that are essential in today’s web-scale world,” stated Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research, Ciena.
