Ciena Updates Optical Control Plane

LINTHICUM, Md. -- Continuing its drive to help service providers boost revenue and better differentiate the customer experience, Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today unveiled OneConnect Intelligent Control Plane, its next generation control plane software. OneConnect introduces a new level of programmability and advanced virtualization features for the Wide Area Network (WAN) as well as enables rich policy-based control more extensively across the network. As a result, many network operators deploying Ciena OneConnect can benefit from more than 40 percent bandwidth savings for service restoration, up to 30 percent latency reduction in highly meshed networks, and new differentiated service offerings including secure Optical Virtual Private Networks (O-VPN).

Ciena’s leadership in control plane technology stems from a 12 year history of innovation and live field deployments in some of the world’s largest, most mission-critical and most performance-demanding networks, representing thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of circuits. In fact, more than 90 percent of field-deployed Ciena Packet-Optical Switching systems run Ciena’s control plane for automated service creation, mesh restoration and service differentiation with some customers reporting unprecedented 99.9999 percent (six-9s) reliability due to the performance and robustness of Ciena’s control plane technology.

Building on this heritage, OneConnect includes numerous engineering innovations and optimizations – it creates, manages and restores bandwidth services faster, and with a richer set of policy options, than competitive control plane offerings. The next-generation OneConnect control plane software is also being made available on Ciena’s multi-layer 6500 Packet-Optical Transport platform, amplifying the benefits of a common intelligent control plane broadly across the network when combined with Ciena’s switching systems.

Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)