Israeli credit card firm Cal (Israel Credit Cards Ltd) built a high-capacity, low-latency private optical network connecting its new data center in Yehud to its main facilities in Giv’atayim.
The metro network was 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.

Ciena and local partner Telrad installed the system.

Cal supplie Visa, MasterCard and Diners Club credit cards as well as other credit solutions to two million customers. The firm relocated its backup site in Rishon LeZion to a new, larger data centre in Yehud due to an increase in data volume and regulatory requirements.

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 modular system supports a seamless upgrade to 40G and beyond, allowing Cal to cost-effectively scale its network capacity as requirements change over time.

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.

Avi Polak, head of infrastructure department at Cal, said: “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.”      

Eric Sele, vice president of sales for Southern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa at Ciena, said:  “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.”