With Agility, Ciena Makes An SDN Play for the WAN

I’m always thinking of 100G when I read about Ciena, but they’ve been making a big move into the SDN world lately. Yesterday they unveiled a new prong of that attack with the release of their Agility portfolio.

Basically, they’ve introduced a multi-layer SDN controller for the WAN based on the OpenDaylight framework. They hope to help service providers with on-demand delivery of virtualized WAN services in a multi-vendor environment. That is certainly something many SDN hopefuls of all sizes are aiming for these days.

Ciena’s solution includes a WAN controller with the support of a bundle of SDN applications: a multilayer path computation engine, a centralized global restoration calculator, network optimization, and of course a network resource broker and scheduling application for on-demand bandwidth.

The key will be just how well the multi-vendor environment works in practice, just as it is for any SDN entry these days. Meeting the OpenDaylight standard is merely the first screen, there’s a lot more work to do to make a product that will live up to the hype. For Ciena though this is just the launch of the product, I imagine that further news about the ecosystem and tests of interoperability will be the next step.

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Categories: SDN · Software · Telecom Equipment