Server Virtualization

Great Plains Communications Upgrades Multi-state Network with Ciena’s Coherent Routing Solution

Great Plains Communications Upgrades Multi-state Network with

Great Plains Communications (GPC), the leading Midwestern telecommunications provider with a growing, privately owned 16,500+ mile fiber network reaching 13 states, is deploying Ciena's (NYSE: CIEN) Coherent Routing solution and WaveLogic 5 Nano (WL5n) technology. This deployment will increase GPC’s network capacity, reliability, and resiliency to adapt to the continually increasing bandwidth needs of business, carrier, and residential customers.

With the enhanced capabilities made possible by the network upgrade, GPC can: • Support 5G and xHaul services for fiber-to-the-tower (FTTT) customers up to 10Gb/s—10 times the previous capacity • Provide high-performance, scalable 400G Data Center Interconnect (DCI) services to large cloud and data center operators • Ensure the utmost resiliency of Layer 2 VPNs with Segment Routing for the protection of packet services

“We strive to continuously improve our network to meet rising bandwidth demands with greater scalability and agility,” said Tony Thakur, Chief Technology Officer, Great Plains Communications. “GPC is committed to providing a customer experience that meets or exceeds the changing needs and expectations of our customers, whether it’s ultra-fast 5G, cloud computing, or high-bandwidth applications like streaming video and gaming—and Ciena’s coherent routing, switching, and optical technology plays a key role in this.”

“As a leading regional service provider in the Midwest, Great Plains Communications always has an eye to the future—especially when it comes to technology advancements and the growing traffic curve,” remarked Kevin Sheehan, CTO of the Americas, Ciena. “With Ciena’s innovative Coherent Routing solution, GPC can support voracious network demand and shifting traffic patterns, fulfilling the needs of its business and residential customers with new in-demand, high-bandwidth services for 5G, cloud connect, and more.”

Managed by Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) multi-layer domain controller, GPC’s network leverages Ciena’s Coherent Routing solution comprising the 5164 Router and 8110 Coherent Aggregation Router with WL5n 100G–400G coherent pluggables, as well as the 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by WaveLogic coherent optics, for optical transport. Installation, turn-up, and test services for the network were provided by Ciena Services to accelerate time to market, and Ciena will perform ongoing maintenance services to ensure the network operates at peak performance.

Additional Information:

• At International Telecoms Week 2023, hear Ciena CTO Steve Alexander speak on Monday, May 15, at 3:05pm (Stage 2) – Subsea fireside chat: What’s the next evolutionary step for subsea cable technology
• GPC will be attending International Telecoms Week 2023 to meet with current and prospective customers

About Great Plains Communications

Great Plains Communications is one of the largest privately-owned digital infrastructure providers in the Midwest and is headquartered in Blair, Nebraska. It has over a century of experience providing business and residential customers in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska and Southeastern Indiana communities with forward-thinking, fiber-based technology services including high-speed internet, Ethernet, video, hosted and traditional voice solutions. The company also takes pride in its progressive approach to accommodating the unique needs of all regional and national telecommunications carriers, LECs, ISPs, wireless carriers and other service providers utilizing superior engineering and custom-build strategies. At the core of its service offering is an extensive, MEF-certified 16,500+ mile regional fiber network that reaches 13 states: Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The network offers community access rings, last-mile and middle-mile solutions, all fully supported by the company’s 24x7x365 Network Operations CenterAbout Ciena Ciena is a global leader in networking systems, services, and software. We build the most adaptive networks in the industry, enabling customers to anticipate and meet ever-increasing digital demands. For three-plus decades, Ciena has brought our humanity to our relentless pursuit of innovation. Prioritizing collaborative relationships with our customers, partners, and communities, we create flexible, open, and sustainable networks that better serve all users—today and into the future.

Spotlight

Other News
Backup and Disaster Recovery

Minimize the Cost and Downtime of Disaster With Scale Computing's Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning Service

PR Newswire | October 25, 2023

Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions, today announced its Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Planning Service, designed to help organizations establish a comprehensive, regulated plan for responding to unforeseen downtime. The service provides Scale Computing customers and partners with the tools, guidance, and resources to create a playbook for data backup and recovery, enabling businesses to endure a disaster scenario with minimal loss. Scale Computing also recently announced that it is a finalist for the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Project of the Year in the 2023 SDC Awards for its work with Austrian managed service provider GiGaNet and its long-time partner the Zillertaler Gletscherbahn group. Voting for the SDC Awards is open at sdcawards.com/vote until November 10th, 2023. Data breaches are one of the biggest and most costly contributors to downtime for businesses. In 2023, the average cost of a data breach globally reached an all-time high of $4.45 million, a 15.3% increase from 2020. Simultaneously, the average length of business disruption following a ransomware attack in the United States reached 24 days last year, up 60% from just two years prior — a significant increase when downtime costs exceed $300,000 per hour for over 90% of mid-sized and large enterprises. For more than half of those businesses, the hourly outage costs range from $1 million to over $5 million. Recovery from an outage adds additional expense from which many enterprises are unable to bounce back. "Disaster can strike at any time, and every organization needs a consistently regulated playbook for how the business will respond — from action plans to recovery plans for bringing online the mission-critical servers businesses depend on," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. "Knowing what systems need to be protected, planning for the ability to recover them, and having a full action plan for recovery should be at the forefront of every IT department's agenda, at the beginning of any infrastructure addition. With Scale Computing Platform, the plan for disaster recovery starts before equipment is even put into production, so IT leaders have a plan in place from day one that they can enact to ensure their business stays up and running, with minimal loss, should disaster strike. Our Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning Service enables businesses to proactively classify systems based on their importance and implement a robust action plan, ensuring that our customers' and partners' critical systems are protected, validated, tested, and ready for recovery at any time." Whether a minor data loss or a business-wide shutdown, having a well-defined business continuity strategy is crucial to minimize financial impact, ensure continuous employee productivity, meet compliance and regulatory requirements, decrease liability obligations, reduce downtime, and minimize the risk of negative exposure. Scale Computing's BCDR Planning Service includes planning, deployment, documentation creation, and disaster recovery testing, covering every aspect to keep businesses prepared and resilient. The service is offered to Scale Computing Platform customers, which brings simplicity, high availability, and scalability together to replace existing infrastructure for running virtual machines with an easy-to-manage, fully integrated platform that allows organizations to run applications regardless of hardware requirements. About Scale Computing Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, Scale Computing Platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime, even when local IT resources and staff are scarce. Edge Computing is the fastest-growing area of IT infrastructure, and industry analysts have named Scale Computing an outperformer and leader in the space, including being named the #1 edge computing vendor by CRN. Scale Computing's products are sold by thousands of value-added resellers, integrators, and service providers worldwide.

Read More

Backup and Disaster Recovery

GRAX Introduces Free Data Backup and Recovery Service for Salesforce

businesswire | September 12, 2023

GRAX, Inc., a leading innovator in Salesforce data management and protection, announces the general availability of GRAX Lite for free Salesforce backup and recovery. GRAX Lite is a game-changing free solution that enables businesses to prevent data loss by safeguarding their Salesforce data. GRAX Lite addresses a critical need in the SaaS data protection market by offering comprehensive free backup software. In an era marked by escalating cyber threats and stringent compliance regulations, GRAX Lite arms businesses with a powerful tool to shield their vital Salesforce data. Built on the principle of data ownership, GRAX Lite gives Salesforce users the power to take back that ownership and control of their valuable Salesforce data with a couple of clicks. "At GRAX, we have always believed that data protection is an unassailable right," said Joe Gaska, Head of Product at GRAX. "With the launch of GRAX Lite, we are breaking down barriers and providing businesses with the tools they need to secure their mission-critical Salesforce data so that they can focus on growing their business." Key capabilities of GRAX Lite for Salesforce Backup and Recovery Effortless Backup and Recovery: GRAX Lite simplifies the backup process allowing users to protect and easily restore their Salesforce data with just a couple of clicks. 100% Data Ownership: GRAX Lite empowers users to retain full ownership of their data by enabling backups into the customer-owned storage service – Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure cloud storage environments. Maintain Your Digital Chain of Custody: With GRAX, users retain full control over their data’s Digital Chain of Custody – GRAX runs entirely in the customer-owned cloud. Unlimited backup storage: GRAX Lite enables users to capture all of their data into their cloud of choice, where users can leverage their existing cloud agreements. Daily Automated Backups: Users gain peace of mind with automated incremental backups of Salesforce data, including files and attachments, ensuring no critical information is lost. Granular Control: Swiftly restore individual records, making it simple to bring back data quickly when you need it. User-Friendly Interface: The user-centric design of GRAX ensures that any user can navigate and deploy free Salesforce data protection from the GRAX Platform with ease. GRAX Lite is a testament to GRAX's commitment to data sovereignty and data governance. By providing a free and user-friendly solution for Salesforce backup and recovery, GRAX Lite empowers organizations to take back ownership of their data assets, create a comprehensive backup strategy, and focus on driving business growth. About GRAX GRAX helps organizations adapt faster by making it easier to get strategic value out of their historical SaaS application data. Customers can fully own, access, and reuse all versions of their cloud application data anywhere, anytime by simply backing up or archiving it to their own cloud environment and seamlessly pushing it into their data ecosystem. GRAX delivers unparalleled SaaS data backup, archive, recovery, and reuse functionality in a fully integrated solution, helping leading organizations improve business continuity, regulatory compliance, customer retention, and revenue growth.

Read More

Server Virtualization, VMware

StorMagic Introduces Edge Control Software to Simplify SvSAN Monitoring and Management

Business Wire | October 18, 2023

StorMagic®, solving the world’s edge data problems, today announced the immediate availability of a new Software as a Service (SaaS) tool that allows users to easily monitor and manage all of their SvSAN clusters around the world. StorMagic Edge Control simplifies the process and tools required for day-to-day SvSAN cluster administration. SvSAN customers with multiple locations can significantly reduce the time spent managing their edge sites, whether they are using VMware, Microsoft or KVM hypervisors. “ESG research shows increasing demand for data storage at the edge which fuels an increased need for monitoring solutions that can help address the complexity of storage at the edge,” said Scott Sinclair, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “SvSAN customers can greatly benefit by adding StorMagic Edge Control into their toolkits; the dashboard views and list formats will make centralized data management much easier and more accessible.” Edge Control delivers centralized administration for SvSAN environments of all sizes. Customers can now manage all SvSAN deployments in any location from a single pane of glass. Dashboard and system views provide a fast but comprehensive status of all of their virtual storage appliances (VSAs), allowing them to keep their environment up-to-date more easily and react faster as needed. “StorMagic customers of any size can now manage their entire SvSAN estate, whether it’s one site or thousands of sites around the world,” said Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer, StorMagic. “Edge Control is particularly interesting for customers who are considering switching from VMware to Microsoft or Linux KVM because SvSAN and Edge Control are both hypervisor agnostic.” Pricing and Availability Edge Control version 1.0 is available today from StorMagic. SvSAN customers can download and begin using the software immediately, free of charge. About StorMagic StorMagic is solving the world’s edge data problems. We help organizations store, protect and use data at and from the edge. StorMagic’s solutions ensure data is always protected and available, no matter the type or location, to provide value anytime, anywhere. StorMagic’s storage and security products are flexible, robust, easy to use and cost-effective, without sacrificing enterprise-class features, for organizations with one to thousands of sites.

Read More

Virtual Server Infrastructure

Scale Computing Offers Simple, Secure, Reliable IT Infrastructure to Combat 'Zombie' Technology

PR Newswire | October 10, 2023

Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions, today announced its new campaign targeting outdated, 'zombie-like' infrastructure and calling on organizations to learn more about Scale Computing Platform's (SC//Platform) future-ready solutions. Between now and November 4, 2023, end users in North America and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) can register for the company's free Zombie Apocalypse Essentials Kit, containing a water bottle, lantern, and powerbank. "IT managers are increasingly dealing with unreliable, inflexible, and inefficient systems. Instead of being haunted by outdated and traditional infrastructure, we invite users to learn more about Scale Computing and our Scale Computing Platform. SC//Platform brings together simplicity and scalability, replacing existing outdated infrastructure and providing high availability for running workloads in a single, easy-to-manage platform, while leveraging our patented self-healing technology to maintain maximum uptime for all applications," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of digital security and protecting personal data. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, maintaining modern infrastructure with a powerful cybersecurity stance is key to keeping critical business applications and data secured. Scale Computing's campaign aims to help businesses fortify their defenses against the three blood-thirsty 'zombies' that commonly haunt outdated, traditional three-tier infrastructure Dreadful Downtime — an unreliable network that causes unexpected and expensive downtime for an organization Mangled Management — disparate technology systems, managed across multiple platforms, that make upgrades, patching, and overall management unnecessarily time- consuming Creeping Complexity — old and outdated systems across multiple locations that make scaling overly complicated SC//Platform provides infrastructure that is simple, secure, scalable, and reliable. With SC//Fleet Manager, the industry's first cloud-hosted monitoring and management tool built for hyperconverged edge computing infrastructure at scale, customers can quickly identify areas of concern using a single pane of glass, scaling from 1 to over 50,000 clusters. Zero-touch provisioning and Secure Link features allow administrators to centrally and securely monitor and manage hundreds or thousands of distributed edge infrastructure deployments, with few or no on-site IT personnel. About Scale Computing Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, Scale Computing Platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime, even when local IT resources and staff are scarce. Edge Computing is the fastest-growing area of IT infrastructure, and industry analysts have named Scale Computing an outperformer and leader in the space, including being named the #1 edge computing vendor by CRN. Scale Computing's products are sold by thousands of value-added resellers, integrators, and service providers worldwide.

Read More