About Southern Light Rail
Southern Light Rail (SLR) is a Georgia Tech non-profit corporation providing National Lambda Rail (NLR) access to the Georgia Research Alliance universities, other universities in the Southern region of the United States and governmental and private sector organizations involved in university research initiatives. SLR will reach out to facilitate dark fiber connectivity to the Southern universities and research centers. This will help enable more collaborative research activities between and within universities.
The Challenge
The SLR network can provide users with a broad range of services from optical lambdas, to single or multi-Gigabit Ethernet channels to IPv4/v6 routed service. By controlling the data
service all the way down to the optical wavelength, SLR is able to provide dedicated network paths without the congestion and delay variations normally experienced in current IPv4-based networks like the Internet and I2. As organizations begin deploying more workloads in Amazon Web Services, SLR needed a solution to optimize traffic flow from the SLR network to the AWS backbone.
Solution
CloudHesive worked with SLR to develop a networking solution built on the SLR backbone with interconnects to AWS via Direct Connect links to optimize the routing of the university network
connections to AWS. This backbone provides services to not only internal university workloads in AWS, but also provides route optimization for 3 rd party SaaS products like Zoom, Blackboard and Salesforce which are hosted in AWS.
