Ciena builds its IP edge
Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 9:31AM Ciena’s acquisition of AT&T’s Vyatta team is a further step in its campaign to bolster its internet protocol (IP) expertise.
Ciena will gain 60 IP engineers with expertise in network operating systems (NOS).
“If you believe that IP-optical convergence is a trend, and Ciena does, then you need expertise in both areas,” says Joe Marsella, vice president, product line management, routing and switching at Ciena.
Joe Marsella
Ciena has been growing its IP expertise for the last five years. “We are competing against companies that have been doing this for 30 years,” says Marsella. “The more experience we can bring in, the more it helps us.”
Ciena says the deal emerged gradually. ”I can’t say it was a Ciena or an AT&T idea; it was a mutual discussion over time that finally resulted in an acquisition,” says Marsella.
Ciena will also gain its first R&D centre in Europe. The deal is expected to be completed before the year-end.
Vyatta
Vyatta, a privately-held company founded in 2005, was acquired a decade ago by Brocade to help the company address virtualisation, public cloud, enterprise, and managed services.
Communications service provider (CSP) AT&T then bought Vyatta’s NOS and certain Brocade assets in 2017 as part of its strategy to virtualise its network. The Vyatta team also enhanced AT&T’s SD-WAN and white box capabilities.
The Vyatta team was an integral part of AT&T’s dNOS software framework developed for open routing that was contributed to the Linux Foundation as the Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project.
Now Ciena is acquiring the unit as AT&T divests elements of its in-house expertise.
“Many of the Vyatta folks were at Brocade, AT&T and now at Ciena,” says Marsella. “This is a pretty consistent team and that experience is super helpful for us.”
Applications
Ciena’s virtualised edge solution is based on a platform onto which third-party virtual network functions (VNFs) are executed. Such VNFs include SD-WAN, firewalls, virtual routing, and encryption.
The platform uses Ciena’s distributed NFV infrastructure (D-NFVI) software that runs on its server platforms or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. Ciena uses its service-aware operating system (SAOS 10.x) as part of the offering.
“That platform that we built is largely about being a neutral host to other people’s virtualisation products,” says Marsella; an approach that suits many customers.
But some customers don’t want to deal with the complexities of mapping VNFs onto the underlying hardware. “They just want a virtual router to work on the virtual platform,” he says.
Adding the Vyatta unit’s IP NOS and deployment know-how will enable Ciena serve both customer sets.
“There are certain verticals, there are certain capabilities that they [Vyatta] have built into their OS that we don’t have today in our SAOS 10.x,” says Marsella.
The new unit also has expertise in disaggregation platforms where software is executed on merchant silicon in a white box.
“Our SAOS 10.x supports disaggregation as well but one of the biggest hurdles as you integrate onto hardware is the data path,” says Marsella. “They have experience in that mapping.”
Ciena’s interest in the virtualised edge covers mobility, enterprise and residential. “Edge is all three and everything in between because there is a lot of overlap between them,” says Marsella.
For mobility, he cites cell-site gateways, while for enterprise the services include SD-WAN and firewalls as well as host platforms such as a micro-CPE and network interface devices (NIDs). Ciena’s residential edge interest, meanwhile, is from its 10-gigabit XGS-PON activities.
Custom versus disaggregated routing
The traditional IP router vendors develop custom silicon such as Cisco’s Silicon One portfolio and Nokia’s FP5 chipset.
A more recent routing development is to use merchant silicon and disaggregated designs, with white box platforms from the likes of Ufispace, Edgecore and Delta based on Broadcom silicon and software such as DriveNets’ Network Cloud.
Ciena says its strategy remains unchanged with the Vyatta acquisition.
“We can run our OS in a disaggregated manner, running SAOS 10.x on a white box, but we also run that same operating system on our hardware platforms,” says Marsella. “But we do build our hardware platforms from merchant silicon; that is the current strategy.”
Using virtualisation, a virtual router running on an Intel processor is suited to applications closer to the edge. “As you move closer to the core, that model doesn’t work as well but it doesn’t mean you can’t run it in a disaggregated [hardware and software] way,” says Marsella. “That is a core router application but it is using disaggregated software but still running on pretty hefty Broadcom-based UfiSpace-built hardware.”
Ciena supports virtualisation and disaggregation models, depending on the network location. “But we haven’t invested in building our own silicon,” says Marsella.
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