John Garrett of Ciena discusses collaborating with Digital Realty on a sweeping greenfield data centre footprint expansion throughout APAC .

“ If you don ’ t work in the service provider industry , you may not be familiar with Ciena . But , we are probably the coolest company in our sector . We drive the bits and bytes of the Internet ,” says John Garrett , Senior Director of Sales in APJ for Ciena .

Founded in 1992 , Ciena is a networking systems , services , and software company that underpins critical digital infrastructure across the world , serving more than 1,700 customers in the service provider , OTT , enterprise network , and hyperscale data centre industries .

Ciena was chosen by Digital Realty as a key technology and interconnections solution provider to support the data centre leader ’ s sweeping expansion throughout the APAC market , balancing a strong commercial proposition that keeps Digital Realty ’ s costper-bit low , while still leveraging cutting edge technology to create a world class experience for their customers .

Ciena has provided the necessary optical infrastructure to connect these new facilities , starting in Singapore , where the partnership completed a deployment earlier this year .

“ We then expanded out to Hong Kong , Osaka , and Tokyo Narita , which are all scheduled to come online in the next few weeks . Then , later in the year , we ’ ll also be helping them connect and bring online another facility in Sydney as well ,” he says . “ It ’ s been a very exciting collaboration , and we ’ re excited to see these sites start to come online as part of PlatformDIGITAL .”

“ There ’ s a level of safety and comfort to Digital Realty ’ s choice of Ciena . They know us and know that they can trust us to deliver the right solutions to meet their needs and , by extension , their customers ’ needs as well ,” he adds .

Looking to the future , Digital Realty ’ s APAC expansion is continuing at both speed and scale . “ They have some significant expansion plans for Asia ,” says Garrett . “ Our collaboration so far has centred on data centres that they already had up and running that we interconnected , but I know that they have other builds underway in other countries . And we ’ re excited about working with them on some of those future projects .”