Ciena Powers Network at Telehouse’s New Paris Data Center

Ciena Corporation and Telehouse Europe, specialised and purpose-built neutral colocation provider, announced that Ciena’s CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform was selected to enable connectivity for the new Telehouse 3 data storage facility in Magny-les-Hameaux near Paris. Deployed during the last two months, the CN 4200-based network provides the scalability and reliability needed to support Telehouse’s customers around the world.

Established in 1988 and owned by Japanese service provider KDDI, Telehouse Europe offers data center facilities and connectivity, providing a secure and resilient platform for mission critical IT systems, to more than 800 customers, from small start-ups to multinationals across awide range of industries. Located approximately 30 kilometers from the centre of Paris – in a secure, secluded area chosen specifically with business continuity and disaster recovery services in mind – Telehouse’s new French facility already counts 15,000 square meters of building space, and is planned to become the largest data center in France. Converting the existing buildings into data center space with an initial €50 million (approximately USD $68M) investment, Telehouse faced a myriad of choices in how to equip its network with a reliable, secure connectivity solution. Having considered leasing capacity from a network operator, the company decided to start by deploying its own network.

"The most crucial criteria that informed our choice of the solution were reliability, flexibility and high availability of the system. Because of the site’s remote location, it was also critical that the solution offer low-latency connectivity. Ciena’s CN 4200 platform specifically addresses mission-critical applications with minimal latency, which made it the ideal solution for this deployment," said Mohamed El Barkani, IT manager at Telehouse Europe. "We were focused on lighting up our new data center and offering services as soon as possible, so the network had to be deployed within extremely ambitious timeframes. Once selected, Ciena immediately responded with outstanding support in the deployment phase and beyond – the network was up and running in less than two months, which greatly surpassed our expectations."

Ciena’s CN 4200 is deployed in a point-to-point optical network with protection routes, seamlessly connecting Telehouse 3 with the Voltaire facility in central Paris. Once operational, the new Telehouse facility immediately began providing Fibre Channel and Ethernet services for customers, with the latter spanning from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps. Offering on-demand programmability and supporting a wide array of services and protocols, the CN 4200 platform also allows Telehouse to further scale its network as and when it needs, future-proofing it for any service, capacity or service level its customers require.

"With its new, flexible network in place, Telehouse can satisfy the needs of even its most demanding customers not only now, but also in the future – regardless of how quickly their requirements evolve," said Francois Locoh-Donou, Ciena’s vice president and general manager for the EMEA region. "The global enterprise sector, which constitutes a majority of Telehouse Europe’s customers, drives what is probably the most dynamic growth in demand for network capacity we’ve seen yet."