FLAG bags CERN Ethernet contract

MUMBAI, INDIA: FLAG Telecom Group Limited (FLAG), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications Limited, has signed a contract with CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

FLAG would provide Gigabit Ethernet connectivity between CERN’s research center in Geneva, Switzerland and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India, FLAG said in a release on Wednesday.

CERN’s requires a solution that delivers uninterrupted, best-in-class, flexible high bandwidth capacity allowing its Indian data center partner, TIFR, access to the enormous data volumes generated by CERN’s particle experiments program in Geneva, Switzerland.

Punit Garg, president of FLAG, said, “We have long since been developing our Ethernet service across our global network and firmly believe it to be the cornerstone of next generation networks. The global Ethernet market is predicted to swell to $25 billion by 2010 and we are intensifying our focus on addressing it.”

David Foster, head of Networking and Communications Systems at CERN, said, “This is an important milestone showing how large-scale scientific projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), being built at CERN, unify communities worldwide. The substantially increased connectivity provided by FLAG will enable the TIFR to fully collaborate as part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). This grid involves over 150 institutes around the globe in the storage and analysis of petabytes of scientific data.”