News

SDN Network Orchestration 'Industry First' Demoed

• By David Ramel
• 03/19/2018

Verizon and Colt have demonstrated what they say is an industry-first breakthrough in software-defined networking (SDN) orchestration in which they made near-real-time changes to bandwidth in each other's production networks.

"This is the first time two-way network orchestration between carrier production networks has been demonstrated anywhere in the world, and marks an important step in enabling real-time cross-carrier automation," the companies announced last week at an event in London.

Verizon has for years been an active player in the next-generation networking space in areas such as SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV), recently taking SDN wireless with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and using SDN and NFV to power its hosted network services.

In announcing the latter last year, the company said: "Verizon has been focused on software-defined networking/network function virtualization (SDN/NFV) since 2015 when it launched the first globally managed software-defined wide area network (SD WAN) service."

Colt, which provides high-bandwidth network and voice services for enterprises and wholesale customers, offers the Colt IQ Network, which the company said connects more than 800 datacenters across Europe, Asia and North America.

The companies said they are working with MEF on developing industry standards, especially for inter-carrier business and operational LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) APIs (Note: this sentence has been edited to remove an incorrect association of MEF with the former name Metro Ethernet Forum). Those APIs, the companies said, will quicken the availability of this flexibility from many more partner networks.

"Enterprise networking is in the midst of a revolution," said Verizon exec Peter Konings in a statement. "Organizations today want intelligent, dynamic networks that respond automatically to their changing business needs. Before today, no-one has been able to demonstrate elastic flexibility across carriers. Today's demonstration is the first time anyone in the world has been able to flex network capacity in both directions across network boundaries. This will be a game changer for enterprise networking."