Ciena adds software to enhance network control
Engineers at Ciena have developed software to provide service providers with greater control over their networks. The operators' customers will also benefit from the software control, using a web portal to meet their own networking needs.
Source: Ciena
"Networks can become more dynamic," says Tom Mock, senior vice president, corporate communications at Ciena. "Operators can now offer more on-demand services." If much work has been done in recent years to make the network's lower layers dynamic, attention is turning to software to make the networks programmable, he says.
Ciena's announced Agility software portfolio, which resides in the network management centre running on standard computing hardware, includes:
- A multi-layer software-defined networking (SDN) controller
- Three networking applications: Navigate, Protect and Optimize. Navigate is used to determine the ideal route for a connection, Protect is a restoration path calculator used to protect against network failures, while Optimize frees up stranded bandwidth across the network's layers.
- Enhancements to Ciena's existing V-WAN network services module.
Ciena chose to implement the SDN controller using the OpenDaylight framework to ensure it will work with other vendors' equipment, while third-party developers writing software using the open source framework will benefit from Ciena's apps and platforms.
"We think the market is evolving so quickly that there isn't any one company that can deal with all the things end users will require," says Mock. "This idea of openness is not so much a nice thing as a requirement; it is going to require the cooperation of multiple vendors to build the kind of network that service providers are going to require."
At the top of the SDN architecture is the application layer, which resides above the control layer that, in turn, oversees the underlying infrastructure layer where the equipment resides. Agility's three network applications sit above the SDN controller while still being part of the control layer (see diagram).
This idea of openness is not so much a nice thing as a requirement; it is going to require the cooperation of multiple vendors to build the kind of network that service providers are going to require
End users can now control their network requirements using the V-WAN orchestrator. Ciena has added monitoring and control interfaces to enhance V-WAN. End users can now control their networking requirements using a web portal. The operator and the end user also have improved visibility about the network's health due to the performance monitoring. More plug-in adaptors have also been added to interface the platform to more equipment, while service providers can use V-WAN to set up VPNs for multiple users.
"[V-WAN] provides for an outside application to control the network directly," says Mock. "A service provider doesn't have to change the connectivity map, or establish or take down a connection."
V-WAN sits between the SDN's upper two layers, allowing applications in the applications layer to access the SDN controller. Ciena has already detailed work with Brocade that allows the vendor's data centre orchestrator - the Application Resource Broker (ARB) used to set up storage and compute resources - can request cloud resources in a remote data centre when demand can no longer be fulfilled in the existing one. Ciena has provided a plug-in adapter between Brocade's orchestrator and V-WAN to establish a connection between the data centres to allow workload transfers as required.
V-WAN will also be used by Equinix to allow end users to connect its data centres with other cloud computing providers. "If an Equinix end user today wants to run part of their applications on Amazon, they can do that, and if tomorrow they have a different set of applications that they want to run on Microsoft, they can do that as well, without changing a real lot of their physical infrastructure," says Mock.
The Agility software portfolio is Ciena's own work, developed prior to its strategic partnership with Ericsson that was announced earlier this year. However, the two companies are now working to add Ericsson's layer-3 capability to the OpenDaylight SDN controller. Mock says the enhanced SDN controller will be available in 2015.
Meanwhile, the V-WAN product is available now. The SDN controller and the three network applications are being trialled and will be available later this year.
SDN starts to fulfill its network optimisation promise
Infinera, Brocade and ESnet demonstrate the use of software-defined networking to provision and optimise traffic across several networking layers.
Infinera, Brocade and network operator ESnet are claiming a first in demonstrating software-defined networking (SDN) performing network provisioning and optimisation using platforms from more than one vendor.
Mike Capuano, Infinera
The latest collaboration is one of several involving optical vendors that are working to extend SDN to the WAN. ADVA Optical Networking and IBM are working to use SDN to connect data centres, while Ciena and partners have created a test bed to develop SDN technology for the WAN.
The latest lab-based demonstration uses ESnet's circuit reservation platform that requests network resources via an SDN controller. ESnet, the US Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network, conducts networking R&D and operates a large 100 Gigabit network linking research centres and universities. The SDN controller, the open source Floodlight Project design, oversees the network comprising Brocade's 100 Gigabit MLXe IP router and Infinera's DTN-X platform.
The goal of provisioning and optimising traffic across the routing, switching and optical layers has been a work in progress for over a decade. System vendors have undertaken initiatives such as External Network-Network Interface (ENNI) and multi-domain GMPLS but with limited success. "They have been talked about, experimented with, but have never really made it out of the labs," says Mike Capuano, vice president of corporate marketing at Infinera. "SDN has the opportunity to solve this problem for real."
"In the world of Web 2.0, the general approach is not to sit and wait till standards are done, but to prototype, test, find the gaps, report back, and do it again"
"SDN, and technologies like the OpenFlow protocol, allow all of the resources of the entire network to be abstracted to this higher level control," says Daniel Williams, director of product marketing for data center and service provider routing at Brocade.
Daniel William, BrocadeInfinera and ESnet demonstrated OpenFlow provisioning transport resources a year ago. This latest demonstration has OpenFlow provisioning at the packet and optical layers and performing network optimisation. "We have added more carrier-grade capabilities," says Capuano. "Not just provisioning, but now we have topology discovery and network configuration."
“The demonstration is a positive step in the development of SDN because it showcases the multi-layer transport provisioning and management that many operators consider the prime use case for transport SDN,” says Rick Talbot, principal analyst, optical infrastructure at Current Analysis. "The demonstration’s real-time network optimisation is an excellent example of the potential benefits of transport SDN, leveraging SDN to minimise transit traffic carried at the router layer, saving both CapEx and OpEx."
Using such an SDN setup, service providers can request high-bandwidth links to meet specific networking requirements. "There can be a request from a [software] app: 'I need a 80 Gigabit flow for two days from Switzerland to California with a 95ms latency and zero packet loss'," says Capuano. "The fact that the network has the facility to set that service up and deliver on those parameters automatically is a huge saving."
Such a link can be established the same day of the request being made, even within minutes. Traditionally, such requests involving the IP and optical layers - and different organisations within a service provider - can take weeks to fulfill, says Infinera.
Current Analysis also highlights another potential benefit of the demonstration: how the control of separate domains - the Infinera wavelength and TDM domain and the Brocade layer 2/3 domain - with a common controller illustrates how SDN can provide end-to-end multi-operator, multi-vendor control of connections.
What next
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has an Optical Transport Working Group that is tasked with developing OpenFlow extensions to enable SDN control beyond the packet layer to include optical.
How is the optical layer in the demonstration controlled given the ONF work is unfinished?
"Our solution leverages Web 2.0 protocols like RESTful and JSON integrated into the Open Transport Switch [application] that runs on the DTN-X," says Capuano. "In the world of Web 2.0, the general approach is not to sit and wait till standards are done, but to prototype, test, find the gaps, report back, and do it again."
Further work is needed before the demonstration system is robust enough for commercial deployment.
"This is going to take some time: 2014 is the year of test and trials in the carrier WAN while 2015 is when you will see production deployment," says Capuano. "If service providers are making decision on what platforms they want to deploy, it is important to chose ones that are going to position them well to move to SDN when the time comes."
Optical components: The six billion dollar industry
The service provider industry, including wireless and wireline players, is up 6% year-on-year (2Q10 to 1Q11) to reach US $1.82 trillion, according to Ovum. The equipment market, mainly telecom vendors but also the likes of Brocade, has also shown strong growth - up 15% - to reach revenues of over $41.4 billion. But the most striking growth has occurred in the optical components market, up 28%, to achieve revenues of over $6 billion, says the market research firm.
Source: Ovum
“This is the first time optical components has exceeded six billion since 2001,” says Daryl Inniss, practice leader, Ovum Components. Moreover, the optical component industry growth has continued over six consecutive quarters with the growth being more than 25% for the past four quarters. “None of the other [two] segments have performed in this way,” says Inniss.
Ovum cites three factors accounting for the growth. Fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) is experiencing strong growth while revenues have entered the market from datacom players from the start of 2010. “The [optical] component recovery was led by datacom,” says Inniss. “We speculate that some of that money came from the Googles, Facebooks and Yahoos!.” A third factor accounting for growth has been optical equipment vendors ordering more long lead-time items than needed – such as ROADMs – to secure supply.
Source: Ovum
The second chart above shows the different market segments normalised since the start of 1999. Shown are the capex spending for optical networking, optical networking equipment revenues, optical components and FTTx equipment spending.
Optical networking spending is some 3.5x that of the components. FTTx equipment revenues are lower than the optical component industry’s and is therefore multiplied by 2.25, while capex is 9.2x that of optical equipment. The peak revenue in 2001 is the optical component revenues during the optical boom.
Several points can be drawn from the normalised chart:
- The strong recent growth in FTTx is the result of the booming Chinese market.
- From 2003 to 2008, the overall market showed steady growth, as illustrated by the best-fit line.
- From 2003 to 2008, capex and optical networking revenues were in line, while two thirds of the optical component revenues were due to this telecom spending.
- From 2010 onwards, components deviated from these two other segments due to the datacom spending from new players and the strong growth in FTTx.
- Once the market crashed in early 2009, optical components, networking and capex all fell. FTTx recovered after only one quarter and was followed by optical components. Optical networking and capex, meanwhile, have still not fully recovered when compared with the underlying growth line.