Tuesday, November 25, 2014

California Research & Education Network Gets 100-Gigabit Upgrade

Officials with participating institutions said the new network backbone will help the state bring additional capacity needed to expand the network to public libraries and other organizations.

BY NEWS STAFF / NOVEMBER 24, 20140  Government Technology


FLICKR/LUCELIA RIBEIRO

A broadband network used by California’s research universities and schools has been upgraded to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), officials announced this week.

The California Research & Education Network (CalREN) has almost 10,000 connection sites among K-12, community colleges, the California State University, University of California campuses and private universities such as Caltech and Stanford.

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) manages and operates CalREN.

Officials with the participating institutions said the new 100-Gbps network backbone will help California remain on the leading edge and bring additional capacity needed to expand the network to public libraries and other organizations.

“Frontier research is being driven today by Big Data, growing in scale at an enormous rate,” said Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership. “CENIC’s backbone upgrade to 100 Gbps is coming just in time to keep California in a leadership position.”

Traffic on the 3,800-mile fiber network continues to grow, said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox.

“This makes ongoing network upgrades like this absolutely critical to the continued health of California’s spirit of innovation,” Fox said.

The network is CENIC’s main focus but it also offers other technology services. Last month the corporation announced the availability of cloud infrastructure services to CENIC members through agreements with CenturyLink, FireHost and Verizon.

This staff report was originally published by TechWire.

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