Lifeline Data Centers, an Indianapolis-based provider of strategic data center outsourcing facilities and services, reportedly has selected Ciena Corporation’s CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to provide high-performance, low-latency connectivity over dark fiber between its existing data center in downtown Indianapolis and its new 460,000-square foot state-of-the-art data center facility twelve miles outside of the city.

 

Lifeline Data Centers provides customers with cost-effective data center space and outsourcing, as well as managed IT services and access to more than 20 service providers.

 

Lifeline Data officials said that as part of a project to dramatically expand its capacity, the company is transforming the former Eastgate Mall – one of Indianapolis’ first retail shopping centers – into a data center, which currently includes 65,000 square feet of space and will ultimately house 460,000 square feet spread across five buildings on the property.

 

The company officials said that after reviewing various options for connecting the two sites, Lifeline secured dark fiber and deployed Ciena’s CN 4200 at each data center to meet its connectivity requirements.

 

Officials said that key selection criteria included the platform’s flexible support of multiple services, carrier-class reliability and the ability to grow capacity in increments, which enables Lifeline to buy and deploy only the capacity it requires when it needs it without sacrificing system capacity.

 

“The ability to offer our clients a network optimized for speed and reliability is critical to both our business and theirs,” said Rich Banta, founder and CTO at Lifeline Data Centers.

 

Banta said that Ciena’s CN 4200 provides a carrier-class network foundation that allows the company to control costs while delivering advanced connectivity services to the customers that complement the state-of-the-art data center facilities and managed services.

 

Lifeline is using the new data center connection to transport customer traffic between sites, backhaul traffic from the new site to connect to service providers in their original data center, and to directly sell its own bandwidth.

 

“Across nearly all industries – from algorithmic financial trading to software-as-a-service applications or electronic medical records – information, entertainment and applications are being aggregated, stored and delivered from increasingly sophisticated data centers. The success of that model requires a combination of hardware, software, services and network connectivity optimized for performance, reliability and security,” said Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena.

 

Alexander said that Lifeline is another example of how data center operators can leverage the flexibility, performance and modular capacity of the CN 4200 to create nimble, service-driven data center connections for cost-effectively transporting any mix of traffic over any distance.

 

Ciena specializes in practical network transition. The company claims that it offers leading network infrastructure solutions, intelligent software and a comprehensive services practice to help the customers use their networks to fundamentally change the way they compete.