Not wanting to create the
perception that their solutions are behind the times and anything less than
state of the art, the telecommunications equipment vendors are always fast to
embrace the next thing. However, the reality is that adopting new technology/methodology
into diverse multivendor elements that comprise a service provider’s (SP)
network is a significant undertaking. This has caused some of the larger
content service providers such as Google and Facebook to undertake the building
and deployment of their own private infrastructures to support their businesses.
Because users’ demand for content delivery is outpacing the cost per bit to
deliver the data, traditional SPs are getting squeezed. Simultaneously, the
time to turn up a service offering has become a real and competitive advantage.
This has forced SPs to look toward new approaches such as software-defined
networking (SDN) to reduce service turn-up times and better leverage the
infrastructure to support content delivery and achieve CapEx and OpEx benefits.
But for SDN to deliver on these benefits it must work in a multivendor
environment and end to end across all services supporting elements in the
network.
Currently, this level of SDN
deployment has only been achieved in a couple of private networks with
proprietary implementations undertaken by the providers. Although this validates
the need and benefits of SDN it by no means makes it mainstream. The question remains, how long will it be before SPs can
implement SDN in a key portion of their networks such as optical transport? Examining
some recently published vendor activity indicates just how ready for prime time
this technology really is.
April 11, 2013, Ciena to Showcase Service Provider SDN at Open
Networking Summit. Ciena demonstrated two service scenarios that leveraged
the automation and central intelligence of its OPn
network architecture to show automated provisioning, virtualization and bandwidth
on demand.
June 12, 2013, Cyan to Demonstrate the First SDN Application Spanning
Enterprise, WAN and Data Center Environments at Interop Tokyo. This demo
tested several use cases and showed interoperability between vendors. Cyan’s
goal was to demonstrate the virtualization of the data center and network
resources. It included members of the recently formed Blue Orbit Ecosystem
June 18, 2013, Coriant announces Intelligent Optical Control (IOC),
industries first solution advancing SDN for optical networks. Coriant claims
its solution, which is the first, allows for the optimization of the optical portion
of the network. Its solution reduces CapEx by as much as 50 percent.
June 24, 2013, Infinera Demonstrates Transport SDN and Packet
Technology on DTN-X Platform at Nissho Labs. This demo featured the DTN-X
working with an external SDN controller and different network applications. It
provisioned bandwidth on demand using OpenFlow and included VLAN switching and
MPLS pseudo-wire transport over a 500G super-channel.
Although these press releases are
show demos or lab trials they are key indicators of market direction and vendor
uptake — to get to the demonstration stage the equipment vendors have invested
in development resources to achieve this level of interoperability. The testing
also helps harden the solution as nuances are identified and addressed by the
vendors; it is a gauge of the technology maturity level of the solution. Multivendor
environments must operate end-to-end to receive the full value and promise of
an SDN networking environment. At this stage, at least for the optical
transport portion of the network the equipment, vendors seem very committed to SDN
and are poised to begin delivery of SDN ready systems in earnest as soon as
2014.
For more information about ACG Research’s optical services, contact sales@acgresearch.net.
Jeff Ogle
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