William McCormick
Verizon Public Sector has secured a $495 million Department of Defense (DOD) contract to deliver a next-generation, high-bandwidth, low-latency, Layer 2 wide area network supporting critical research.
The company will provide switch, router, firewall and Edge Compute capabilities to help connect 200 different research, development, test, and evaluation laboratories and High-Performance Computing locations across the U.S. and overseas, Verizon said Thursday.
“Investments across Verizon’s enterprise business enable the kind of tailored solutions our team will deliver to the U.S. Department of Defense and the Defense Research and Engineering Network,” commented Jennifer Chronis, senior vice president for public sector at Verizon and a 2021 Wash100 Award recipient.
“Our managed services solutions will create a next-generation user experience for research teams utilizing the DREN platform while also enhancing security across the network.”
DOD’s supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computational science expertise enable DOD professionals to conduct a broad range of focused RDT&E and acquisition engineering activities.
Multidisciplinary teams will be able to work together in real-time, with throughput and latency at speeds of up to 100Gbps and even 400Gbps, to develop and test big data analyses, artificial intelligence, machine learning and simulations.
Verizon Public Sector’s DREN is a high-speed fiber-optic network that connects military supercomputers and multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, helping them collaborate in scientific research, engineering, and testing efforts to benefit the DOD as a whole.
DREN4 is meant to enable multidisciplinary teams to incorporate technical enhancement and innovation on a continuous, evolutionary basis with increased transparency to day-to-day operations.
