Blackboard chose Infinera's Cloud Xpress, with its small form factor, low-power solution, and integration with Infinera's Instant Bandwidth™ solution, designed to easily scale bandwidth in 100-gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) increments without hardware changes. Infinera Cloud Xpress enables Blackboard to deliver enhanced educational services to students and the institutions they serve, providing up to one terabit per second (Tb/s) of inbound and outbound capacity in just two rack units (RU). Furthermore, Cloud Xpress is designed to streamline operations and offer device simplicity, including a single fiber to deliver a 500 Gb/s super-channel of network capacity, a highly reliable integrated photonic circuit, and the flexibility of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 40 GbE today, and 100 GbE client interfaces in the future. Cloud Xpress's ultra-low power consumption and rack-and-stack form factor allow Blackboard to scale while using minimal space and energy—a key consideration in today's data centers. Furthermore, Cloud Xpress is designed with a novel software approach that enables it to connect to existing cloud provisioning systems using open software-defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs). Similar to the server and storage infrastructure currently deployed in the cloud, Cloud Xpress is designed to integrate easily and quickly into existing operational processes, enabling cloud providers to scale rapidly and simplify operations.
“As we introduce higher-quality video, audio, and other new technologies to deliver the most comprehensive teaching and learning solutions for our customers, we need to progressively scale our network to support the dramatic growth in data,” said Peter George, senior vice president of product development at Blackboard. “We selected Infinera Cloud Xpress for this urban network because of its ability to rapidly and incrementally increase capacity without any significant network overhauls. With Cloud Xpress and Instant Bandwidth, we can expand capacity very quickly as needed. No other vendor provides this capability.”.
"The massive growth in bandwidth is impacting every part of the data center ecosystem," said Stu Elby, senior vice president of cloud network strategy and technology at Infinera. "Blackboard's Cloud Xpress rollout further underscores the need for simple, highly scalable data center interconnection solutions across a variety of markets.".
