US Fibre provider test-drives wide-area SDN

This is one of the environments in which we might see early SDN flowerings aimed at corporate users. DukeNet describes itself as a regional fibre network provider offering advanced data and high-capacity bandwidth services to enterprises, data centres and carriers.

It says the SDN demo, conducted in a real-world multi-vendor environment, displays the company’s ability to spin up virtual machines in a data centre and then link them across its fibre to customer corporate premises (and other data centres) via its virtual network facilities.

It’s deployed technology from its partners Cyan and Accedian Networks and the SDN use case demo “involves applications running on an enterprise server dynamically placing requests for additional cloud data centre virtual machines and associated network resources using OpenStack application program interfaces (APIs) and OpenFlow across the DukeNet network.

It’s deployed technology from its partners Cyan and Accedian Networks and the SDN use case demo “involves applications running on an enterprise server dynamically placing requests for additional cloud data centre virtual machines and associated network resources using OpenStack application program interfaces (APIs) and OpenFlow across the DukeNet network.

“Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform services the request on behalf of network resources and proxies the compute and data center network demands to an OpenStack server in the cloud data center,” according to the press release. “Blue Planet performs all functions necessary to turn up additional services across DukeNet’s network including carrier Ethernet and optical edge devices from Accedian Networks.

“The data center instance of OpenStack negotiates with compute resources and data center switches to allocate the necessary network and compute capacity.”