Israel’s Leading Credit Card Company Selects Ciena for Metro Deployment

         Ciena’s solution enables Cal’s business continuity strategy and compliance with financial services industry regulations

LINTHICUM, Md., U.S.A. and GIV’ATAYIM, Israel — 07/23/2012

Ciena^® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings), the network specialist, and its BizConnect Platinum partner Telrad, have been selected by Cal (Israel Credit Cards Ltd) to build a high-capacity, low-latency private optical network connecting its new data centre in Yehud to its main facilities in Giv’atayim. The metro network was recently installed in an aggressive timeframe and allows Cal to address business growth and local disaster recovery requirements, as well as avoid the need to utilize costly leased connectivity.

Key Facts:

• Cal is one of Israel’s leading credit companies, and markets Visa, MasterCard and Diners Club credit cards as well as other credit solutions to approximately two million customers. Driven by an increase in data volume and regulatory requirements, Cal decided to relocate its backup site in Rishon LeZion to a new, larger data centre in Yehud. The additional bandwidth requirements meant that Cal needed to quadruple capacity on the 30 km link connecting its data centres, which made it more cost efficient to build a dedicated network versus leasing a managed line from a local service provider.

• Ciena’s 4200 Advanced Services Platform is being used by Cal to support two 10G Ethernet and four 4G Fibre Channel connections between the data centres. The highly-scalable modular system supports a seamless upgrade to 40G and beyond, allowing Cal to cost-effectively scale its network capacity as requirements change over time.

• The Ciena-based high-capacity network significantly improves Cal’s back-up and storage processes. It now takes a quarter of the time to backup a day’s worth of data and now every transaction can be stored in both sites. This allows Cal to comply with regulatory disaster recovery requirements and uphold its business continuity plan, while enabling the enterprise’s personnel to work more efficiently.

• As part of the data centre development project, Cal leased two dark fibre links between its sites to be used as active-active links, for which Ciena’s technology provides a very low latency solution.

• The migration and expansion project took place within an ambitious timeframe – Telrad and Ciena worked closely together to complete the deployment in only two weeks without any disruption to Cal’s existing services.

• The contract also includes a long-term service agreement. Ciena trained Cal’s Operations Group to efficiently manage the network, while Telrad’s local team is providing timely issue resolution and ongoing support through on-the-job training and a local call centre.

Executive Comments:

• “Our business continuity planning efforts and regulatory compliance requirements, coupled with our constant growth and commitment to offer our customers the best service possible, led to the need to reassess our data centre interconnect infrastructure. Two aspects played a central role when selecting our networking partner: future-proof technology and trust. Ciena’s highly resilient, scalable and low-latency network allows Cal to cost-effectively plan for future growth. At the same time, we also know that Ciena’s roadmap will continue to support this platform, since it is ahead of the industry and allows a seamless upgrade to 40G and beyond. Telrad’s ability to meet Cal’s timeline and ongoing support has been equally important.”
  –       Avi Polak, head of infrastructure department at Cal 

• “Financial organisations operate in a highly-regulated and fast-paced environment, with requirements likely to increase as regulators across the globe focus on data recovery, security and business continuity concerns. With Ciena’s technology, Cal can be ahead of the competition in today’s volatile business environment and easily adapt its network to meet future requirements, from higher capacity to in-flight encryption.”
  –       Eric Sele, vice president of sales for Southern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa at Ciena

• “Credit card holders rely on their provider to reliably and efficiently handle their financial information and transactions – and financial institutions face great losses and reputation damage if they cannot fulfil this promise. Telrad and Ciena have partnered to provide Cal with a reliable, efficient and future-proof solution that involves both state of the art technology and ongoing local support. Telrad’s support and field engineering teams are always on hand to help prevent and resolve any issues.”
  –       Shai Yanai, executive vice president at Telrad 

Technology Leadership:

• Ciena’s 4200 is a multiservice aggregation and transport solution that supports a wide range of services to meet all business application transport requirements over a single network with carrier-grade reliability.

• Ciena’s equipment allows for smooth integration with the storage solution deployed in Cal’s data centres.

• The platform includes Ciena’s FlexiPort, the industry’s first remotely programmable transport technology, which allows fast provisioning and turn-up of new services across the network and simplifies moves and changes for existing services.

Supporting Resources:

• Product Brochure: 4200: Redefining the Service-Enabled Optical Network
• Whitepaper: Ciena’s 4200 Boots Competitive Advantage for Fortune 500 Firm
• Whitepaper: Wire-speed Encryption Solution

Jamie Moody
Ciena Corporation
+1 (214) 995-8035
pr@ciena.com

Paula Muezerie
Ciena Limited
+44 (0) 207012 5640
pmuezeri@ciena.com

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