OVH Partners with Infinera

OVH selects the company for international expansion.

Infinera, a provider of digital optical networking systems to telecommunications carriers worldwide, today announced that OVH, a web hosting company, has selected its digital architecture for its pan-European network. The company avers that OVH has deployed an Infinera Digital Optical Network to offer high-speed connections with reliability, flexibility, and intelligent management throughout its network.

According to it, after an initial deployment of its network and another optical vendor's network between Paris and Roubaix in 2006, OVH has decided to go forward with the company as its provider of optical networks. OVH is utilizing the company's services to connect its peering points in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Frankfurt. A graphical representation of the traffic on the OVH network may be found at http://weathermap.ovh.net. The company adds that OVH is now planning a further major expansion into the U.S. market.

It claims that OVH chose its solution for its ease of operation and network management, including a powerful GMPLS control plane for enabling intelligent, automated network discovery, service provisioning, and service recovery. The company's solution enables OVH to deploy a scalable, flexible and resilient optical infrastructure for its core business, and easily manage its lifecycle with its end-to-end network management solution, Infinera Management Suite (IMS).

The company explains that OVH's aim is to deploy its network as close as possible to its customers so as to maintain the shortest link between its servers and the end-user. OVH has designed its network with high-availability architecture, and its GMPLS capability supports that architecture with re-routing of traffic in case of network issues to guarantee network reliability and uptime. OVH is planning to open two new data centers by the first half of next year, including one in Strasbourg in eastern France to provide connections to Eastern Europe, and one in either the south of France or Spain to provide connectivity to customers in southern Europe. Today OVH operates 80,000 servers, with plans to increase that to 100,000 by the first half of next year.

"OVH is a highly entrepreneurial, technological innovator playing a leading role in making internet services more accessible to millions of people, and we are delighted to support them with a pan-European Infinera network," said Infinera CEO Tom Fallon.

"Initially, we were attracted by the ease of installation and the speed of installation of the Infinera network," commented Octave Klaba, Founder and President of OVH. "Later on, we appreciated the flexibility of the Infinera network, its reliability, and the speed with which we could add capacity to the network." "For us, these Infinera features deliver clear benefits to our business," Klaba explained. "Our customers want us to guarantee network quality, low latency and quick access to their websites, and we get that with our Infinera backbone. These features are critical in several customer segments, including, for example, online gaming. We have had no major incident on our network in four years of working with Infinera and we therefore have confidence in their technology as the platform for our entire network."