CN 4200 Qualified for IBM

LINTHICUM, Md. -- Ciena Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced successful completion of interoperability testing and qualification of its CN 4200™ FlexSelect™ Advanced Services Platform for both IBM’s Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ (GDPS®) business continuity solution and Server Time Protocol (STP), the new generation of technology for time synchronization of System Z™ mainframe server environments.

The CN 4200 is currently the only GDPS-qualified WDM solution with advanced time-division multiplexing (TDM) capabilities for multiple Inter-System Channel (ISC) links exchanging STP time synchronization messages. The benefit of Ciena’s unique approach is a dramatic reduction in wavelength channel counts, resulting in a lower cost of network connectivity. This Ciena STP feature is being released to support IBM’s STP technology, made generally available (GA) on January 31, 2007, so that WDM network customers can optimize its advantages.

GDPS is a widely-deployed IBM family of solutions used primarily for IBM mainframe servers to provide customers with disaster recovery and continuous application availability capabilities. STP is IBM’s newest generation of GDPS server time protocol synchronization technology, and is designed to allow multiple servers and coupling facilities to maintain synchronization with each other without requiring a Sysplex Timer®. Eliminating the need for Sysplex Timers can extend the distance between GDPS timer site locations from 40 km to up to 100 km for a GDPS/PPRC (Peer to Peer Remote Copy) solution. STP also provides simplification of infrastructure and can help reduce the overall cost of cross-site connectivity. Ciena’s CN 4200 platform provides enterprise organizations and managed connectivity service providers the most efficient and scalable WDM solution for STP and GDPS business continuity applications.

“The ability of Ciena’s CN 4200 to support the coexistence of current GDPS/Sysplex Timer solutions in addition to the new GDPS/STP technology can help ease customer migration from existing to new GDPS server applications,” said R. B. Swift, program director for IBM’s System Z Connectivity Solutions.

Ciena Corp.