Huawei launches 9 NFV and SDN platforms; Masergy goes live; and OpenDaylight unveils Lithium
Network infrastructure provider Huawei continued its push into the virtualized world, announcing nine software-defined networking and network functions virtualization platforms at the recent Open Networking Summit 2015 event.
Three of the platforms focused on increasing network agility, including its Flow Engine 2.0; Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System-based IP+optical synergy; and an open source on-demand bandwidth adjustment for optical network transport. Huawei claimed the SDN platforms could improve resource utilization by up to 100%.
Four of the platforms focused on northbound interface improvements, including its Open Network Hypervisor; NEMO SDN programming language solution; an open source TSDN controller designed to support various service APPs; and an IP+optical synergy for multivendor SDN controllers that Huawei said was based on third-party orchestrators.
Finally, Huawei launched a pair of cloud-based products, including its L3VPN virtual private network product developed with China Unicom that is said to use standard northbound and southbound APIs that tap into an ONOS-based SDN controller platform to support on-demand VPN adjustments. The other product was an ONOS-based Central Office platform that Huawei said provides L3VPN using virtual CPE and ONON with NetMatrix as the orchestrator.
Huawei earlier this year announced a partnership with the Open Networking Foundation and ONL to build an open ecosystem designed to support commercial carrier deployments of SDN.
Masergy deploys NFV at the edge
Cloud networking provider Masergy has reportedly tapped a network function virtualization platform powered by Overture, Brocase, Fortinet and Intel that offers “carrier-class, pure-play” NFV at the edge of the network.
The deployment, dubbed Virtual f(n), taps Overture’s Ensemble Carrier Ethernet product, Brocade’s Vyatta 5600 virtual router and Fortinet’s FortiGate-VM firewall virtualized network functions running on Overture’s 65vSE VNF compute node platform, which uses Intel’s Atom processor. The product is said to provide gigabit throughput similar to that offered by appliance-based carrier Ethernet 2.0.
Masergy noted the deployment will allow the company greater agility when launching and provisioning services.
“Our primary focus is on service agility and our pure-play NFV deployment sets the stage for immediate response to customer requests,” said Tim Naramore, CTO at Masergy. “With this launch, we’re adding incredibly agile and flexible solutions to our Managed Network f(n) family of distributed, fully managed network functions.”
Overture recently released the results of a collaborative effort showing robust performance of NFV service chaining. The testing was done in partnership with Brocade, Intel and Spirent, and showed “zero packet loss throughput” for a pair of gigabit ports carrying “line-rate IMIX traffic through multiple VNFs in a pure-play NFV environment.” The company noted that pure-play NFV is considered the running of software VNFs on standards servers with no specialized networking hardware.
RCR Wireless News spoke with Mike Heffner, senior director of technical product marketing at Overture Networks, on the testing results.
OpenDaylight launches Lithium
The OpenDaylight Project unveiled its third open SDN software release dubbed Lithium, which the organization said was tailored toward those looking for production-ready products and leveraging Open Platform for NFV.
Lithium is said to provide increased scalability and performance; network services for cloud data center platforms; new features for security and automation; enhanced APIs designed for greater interoperability; and six new protocols to support more use cases.
Lithium follows up on the previously released Hydrogen and Helium software releases.
“Our second release, Helium, was deployed in a wide variety of use cases – from people looking to better manage and orchestrate their existing networks to ‘Internet of Things’ and smart cities, to those who are managing clouds and deploying or testing NFV,” said Neela Jacques, executive director at OpenDaylight. “With Lithium, OpenDaylight meets the needs of people going into production and we’ll be expanding on these use cases at the OpenDaylight Summit this July.”
The OpenDaylight Project, which recently celebrated its two-year anniversary, was founded out of the Linux Foundation with an overall goal in taking on the issue of simplifying network management, a challenge that plagues the majority of today’s IT teams.
Jacques recently joined RCR Wireless News’ weekly NFV/SDN Reality Check video show to discuss the continued evolution of the OpenDaylight Project, NFV and SDN, and the impact open-source collaborations have had on that evolution.
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