Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that Children’s Hospital Boston, one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, has deployed the CN 4200™ FlexSelect™ Advanced Services Platform to enable high-speed optical connections between multiple locations throughout its Boston campus, and facilities in nearby Waltham, Mass. and Needham, Mass., to ensure reliable, efficient data connectivity for critical applications and seamless business continuity and disaster recovery.
Children’s Hospital Boston is comprised of several locations in downtown Boston primarily associated with pediatric healthcare and medical research. With an expansion to another facility located several miles away in Waltham, and the moving of their primary data center to a state of the art facility in another Boston suburb, Children’s sought a high-performance, scalable Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) solution that offered the performance and reliability of their Local Area Network (LAN) over a Wide Area Network (WAN) with the flexibility to accommodate future growth. Children’s selected Ciena’s CN 4200 through the EMC Select program for its unique multi-protocol capabilities, enabling the delivery of multiple services on-demand, including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), Fibre Channel and video across multiple locations, as well as its low latency to enable the fastest response times and the ability to scale to meet the needs of new services at higher speeds as demand evolves.
“With our increasing dependency on clinical information systems and the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), we need to provide a 100 percent available network backbone with capacity and performance that supports the application response times our clinicians require. With such critical information stored and sent across our network for hospital operations and data backup, we needed a versatile connectivity solution that would grow with our network and evolving clinical data requirements,” said Paul Scheib, director of IS Operations at Children’s Hospital Boston. “The CN 4200 stood out among competing platforms for its carrier-grade reliability and flexible design, particularly its software programmable hardware, allowing us to deliver any type of information on-demand to any point on our network. Our caregivers, no matter their location, have instant access to vital patient information that improves their diagnoses and treatments, thus enhancing the patient care.”
Ciena’s CN 4200 is a next-generation WDM transport and aggregation platform that can be configured on-demand to support any transport protocol—including SONET/SDH, Ethernet/GbE/10GbE, storage (Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON) or video—at any speed, on any available port using the industry's first universal line card with individual user-programmable ports. Powered by FlexSelect OS, Ciena's intelligent control plane technology, and managed through ON-Center® Network and Service Management Suite, the CN 4200 provides unprecedented levels of network automation, including granular service level management and remote, point-and-click provisioning for adding or dropping services on the network.
“Traditional networking technologies are not equipped to meet the critical performance and flexibility requirements for the delivery of demanding healthcare applications,” said Ray Patalano, enterprise marketing manager at Ciena. “Recognizing the mission-critical nature of healthcare information as well as the need to meet HIPAA requirements, the CN 4200 provides Children’s Hospital Boston with a proven, carrier-class solution that efficiently and flexibly delivers a full mix of applications across the entire organization – over any distance – with low latency and high availability.”
Ciena brings carrier-class expertise to the demanding healthcare communications environment with its FlexSelect Architecture, which offers a WAN solution to deliver critical patient and operational data at maximum throughput while pushing the laws of physics to keep network latency low. Enabling a network that is always available, never drops packets and delivers deterministic response, FlexSelect Architecture allows healthcare organizations to centralize servers and storage devices located in fewer locations and farther apart with a high-speed optical network that extends the reach of time-sensitive, mission-critical data out to remote sites for access and backup.
Ciena’s CN 4200 is available through the EMC Select Program, and is qualified by all major storage vendors. Ciena is a member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and its equipment is helping leading healthcare organizations to create flexible WANs to support HIPAA compliance and a variety of healthcare applications including business continuity, remote storage extension and picture archiving communication systems (PACS).
Ciena will showcase the CN 4200, CN 2000™ Storage and LAN Extension Platform, and ONLINE Metro™ Multiservice DWDM Platform in its booth at EMC World, May 21-24, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.
About Ciena
Ciena Corporation is the network specialist, focused on expanding the possibilities for its customers’ networks while reducing their cost of ownership. The Company’s systems, software and services target and cure specific network pain points so that telcos, cable operators, governments and enterprises can best exploit the new applications that are driving their businesses forward. For more information, visit www.ciena.com.
Note to Investors
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-Q, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 2, 2007. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
