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Ciena and Abacus Technology to upgrade NASA Kennedy Space Center’s IT Network

January 17, 2012 – With an aging and fragmented campus network bearing the weight of growing bandwidth demands, NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is turning to Ciena Corp. and Abacus Technology Corp. to create a converged telecommunications infrastructure. The enhanced network, which will support activities that range from managing NASA’s space launch program to hosting visitors from around the world, will leverage Ciena’s Optical Transport Network (OTN) technology to consolidate the Center’s Ethernet, video and legacy ATM and TDM traffic.

“Ciena’s OTN solution will enable telemetry, data, voice and video convergence onto a common transport and allow us to seamlessly migrate off multiple independent and obsolete legacy transport systems,” said Kerry Stinson, director communication services, Abacus Technology. “The OTN implementation will simplify our network and streamline operations, and enables KSC to provision reliable, high speed/high bandwidth communication services to commercial launch operations in a more cost effective manner.”

The KSC is comprised of more than 200 facilities spread across a 144,000 acre complex.

“The use of OTN technology provides an elegant solution for complex networks like the one at Kennedy Space Center that support many types of legacy, Ethernet and real-time applications,” said David Peed, vice president and general manager, Ciena Government Solutions. “Ciena’s solution can more efficiently carry this multiservice traffic over a single infrastructure, and easily add new types of applications to the network as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center continues to push the boundaries of exploration.”