News

Fujitsu Unveils Suite for Software-Defined Networking

• By David Ramel
• 01/07/2016

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. yesterday announced a new suite of layered products to advance software-defined networking (SDN) for carriers, service providers and cloud builders.

Virtuora NC, based on open standards, is described by Fujitsu as "a suite of standards-based, multi-layer, multi-vendor network automation and virtualization products" that "has been hands-on hardened by some of the largest global service providers."

The multi-layer aspect comes in the form of abstractions built by Fujitsu on top of the open SDN control framework layer, which itself is built upon the OpenDaylight (ODL) platform. The company said the additional layers leverage the built-in ODL components without coupling them to specific applications or devices.

"This distinct separation of applications, controller infrastructure and southbound interfaces provides customers the ability to leverage Agile and IT DevOps methodologies for maintenance and upgrades, or even migrate to another controller platform, with minimal impact to the interfaces and applications running on the controller," the company said in a statement yesterday. "The benefit of this open and modular controller framework is reduced testing and full-feature continuity -- regardless of network traffic."

Fujitsu said its solution delivers better network programmability -- a key tenet of SDN -- that enables the rapid innovation of services and gets products to market quicker.

Specifically, the company said Virtuora NC and associated applications help carriers accomplish key goals in moving to SDN, such as:

• Improving time-to-market for new products and features through abstraction at the device, service and network layers, enabling a faster return on product investment.
• Delivering rapid service innovation via an open control environment with distinct separation of the controller, southbound and application layers.
• Automating process integration and improving information access to enable multilayer design, resource utilization and elimination of slow and error-prone manual handoffs.
• Eliminating traditional OSS development cycles through the prolific use of YANG modeling and abstraction.
• Providing open, standards-based interfaces to key components that reduce cycle times and improve network agility.

Supporting applications for the suite include Resource Discovery, Path Computation, Dynamic Service Activation and Restoration and Fragmentation Analysis.

"We are glad to see Fujitsu delivering game-changing innovation in the market leveraging the OpenDaylight Project," the company quoted Neela Jacques, executive director of OpenDaylight, as saying. "This release delivers on Fujitsu's stated strategy to deliver solutions that leverage de-facto standard open source platforms and meet their customers' needs."