Editorial StaffSDN is becoming a must-have for service providers who want to provide more efficient, differentiated services. A survey we recently commissioned of our customers bears this out (see results below). First, we want to congratulate one of our customers for their pioneering work in SDN. Neutrona Networks recently won the Best Data Service Innovation award at the Nov. 3 Global Carrier Awards ceremony in Paris for creative use of an internally developed WAN-SDN system to efficiently manage their customer traffic throughout the Latin America region. Neutrona explained the need for the system and its benefits this way:
“The Latin American market has experienced rapid growth over the last few years, placing major strains on a regional infrastructure traditionally seen as inadequate. Neutrona responded to the challenge by turning to an independent and neutral strategy that combined its extensive relationships with local access networks and redundant sub-sea cable systems.
While this solution provides network flexibility for its carrier partners, it’s also very complex. Neutrona needed a way to effectively manage both capacity and traffic, or else it would not be able to provide the highest quality service at a competitive price. So it created a WAN Software Defined Networking (SDN) system that uses a hybrid methodology based on specific business rules to ensure data gets to its destination in the most efficient manner possible.”
We are working with Neutrona on their SDN endeavors via our new SDN Platform that provides access to its analytics, optimization algorithms, policy, and orchestration components via open APIs. As David Flamini, Principal Network Architect for Strategy & Service Innovation at Neutrona, stated in our announcement last week:
“Earlier this year, Neutrona selected the Explorer products to help us assure the performance of critical services running over thousands of traffic-engineered tunnels in our pan-regional network. We are working closely with the Packet Design team to develop SDN applications that will enable us to accelerate service delivery and programmatically adapt our network to shifting business demands. By using the APIs, we are able to leverage Packet Design’s rich analytics in our own custom applications.”
Many of our other service provider customers indicate serious work on SDN as well. According to an independent TechValidate survey we commissioned of about 50 of our (mostly service provider) customers, 87 percent said SDN is relevant to their job. Fifty-seven percent revealed that their companies are working with SDN or will be within six months. Most see routing path analytics being more important with SDN and, consequently, 90 percent of surveyed customers indicated they would use Packet Design products to implement and/or manage SDN.
In addition, 70 percent said the SDN application they believe would be of the most value to them is optimization and automated provisioning of traffic-engineered tunnels. This is fortuitous, since the first SDN application we’ve developed is an SDN-TE app, which leverages the SDN Platform’s rich network telemetry and analytics to automate the difficult and time-consuming task of balancing network loads.
For more information about the challenges of SDN management for service providers and our new products for overcoming them, check out these resources:
Video with Packet Design CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu and Light Reading Editor-at-Large Carol Wilson: SDN Management & Orchestration in the WAN
Heavy Reading White Paper by Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Caroline Chappell: Combining Management Intelligence & SDN Programmability to Meet Hyperfast Enterprise Needs
White Paper by Packet Design CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu: The Missing Layer: SDN Management and Orchestration for Multi-Service Networks
SDN Platform Demo Video: SDN Management and Orchestration Platform Demo
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