Displaying items by tag: SDN

PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, has launched the Online Cloud Connect service providing connectivity to Microsoft Azure.

This is an innovative Network-as-a-Service product that extends a customer’s MPLS network service to both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365, benefiting them by providing a service which is insulated from the public Internet with improved and predictable performance and vastly reduced latency.

The Online Cloud Connect service leverages the capabilities of PCCW Global's Software Defined Network (SDN) and is an evolution beyond traditional and existing cloud connect services in the market. Enterprises and institutions gain flexibility, scalability, reliable performance and control over their connectivity to the cloud to fit their requirements at any given time.

Mr. Jordick Wong, Senior Vice President, Product and Vendor Management, PCCW Global, said, “Through an intuitive, easy to manage online service portal, our MPLS customers can now establish their own private connection to Microsoft Azure very easily and conveniently.”

Wong added, “The service portal offers online ordering and automatic provisioning together with flexible subscription packages starting from as little as a one-hour timeslot. Customers can subscribe to the bandwidth they require from a range of 50 to 1000 Mbps at the point of demand, and pay as they go without any human interaction being required.”

The Online Cloud Connect service is in the process of further extending its online ordering and automatic provisioning capabilities to include other major public cloud service providers.

Singapore’s largest telecom company Singtel announced the launch of its new network solution – Singtel Managed Software-Defined Branch (Singtel SD Branch) to support enterprises’ evolving networking needs across the globe.

Highly scalable and cost-efficient through a “white box” or generic hardware, Singtel SD Branch empowers enterprises in managing multiple and virtualized network functions at their existing sites or when they expand into new branch offices.  

With Singtel SD Branch, enterprises are assured of enhanced security and optimal performance of their networks and applications. They can better monitor network usage and issues in real-time. Enterprises can also add new functions, such as unified threat management, to the same hardware without incurring additional installation charges. These will in turn reduce their capital and operating expenditures.

“Many enterprises today deal with challenges of complex hybrid WAN architecture encompassing private and public Internet networks,” said Mr Goh Boon Huat, Vice President, Global Products at Singtel Group Enterprise.

“Singtel SD Branch provides a way to spin up and take down services seamlessly, offers full service visibility and manageability up to the application layer. This simplifies their WAN infrastructure, enabling agile managed network solutions to keep pace with growing business needs in different geographical regions.”

Singtel SD Branch is available globally and integrated seamlessly with Singtel’s underlay assets of submarine cables, IP VPN network of 428 Points of Presence, and its Global Internet service in more than 200 countries.

Developed based on the network functions virtualization (NFV) concept, Singtel SD Branch is the latest addition to Singtel’s suite of next generation SD network solutions following the launch of its SD-WAN in 2015 and cloud-based NFV service last year. Embedded with Singtel’s Security by Design, enterprises’ network services are protected against security breaches.

Singtel’s SD network solutions will help enterprises meet their WAN requirements, and employ a consistent and comprehensive unified portal for end-to-end monitoring, analytics, and visibility into all of their networks and application services. Enterprises are also able to provision new services and scale their network bandwidths on demand.

Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, announced a significant addition to its roster of global financial customers with its first SDN-based, large enterprise project win in China with China Pacific Insurance Company (CPIC), the country's second-largest property insurance company.

The private cloud SDN project, won via Nokia Shanghai Bell, will use Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) in two CPIC data centers: one to integrate the dispersed IT systems of 82 branch offices into one unified private cloud platform, and the second to assist in building and testing the company cloud for R&D. As a result, CPIC can achieve improved flexibility, agility and security, all while simplifying network operations and lowering IT costs.

“Nuage Networks VSP has a clear momentum in the telecoms industry, and we’re excited to bring that same technology to large enterprises here in China, in this case helping CPIC deliver a unified cloud experience,” said Jin Jian, head of the Enterprise & Public Sector unit at Nokia Shanghai Bell.

“Working with a top insurer like CPIC serves as an excellent reference for the broader industry, and we see this as an opportunity to win more large enterprise projects in China, continuing Nokia’s push into vertical markets beyond the telecoms space,” Jian added.

Nuage Networks VSP will enhance CPIC's efficiency by increasing scale and reducing errors with a centralized policy manager. The solution gives CPIC and other financial institutions greater agility to automate the configuration, management and optimization of virtual networks, including security services for individual applications and workloads.

The contract builds on Nokia's track-record of helping financial services companies to digitally transform, a key focus of the company as it expands its customer base beyond the traditional telecommunications sphere. Deployment started in August 2017.

India’s largest telecom services provider, Bharti Airtel, announced a strategic partnership with South Korean telecom provider SK Telecom, under which the Indian comapny will leverage SK Telekom’s expertise to build the “most advanced telecom network in India”.

“SK Telecom is delighted to announce a strategic partnership with Bharti Airtel, a global leading mobile operator,” said Park Jung-ho, the President and CEO of SK Telecom. “SK Telecom will work closely with Bharti to achieve new network innovations so as to deliver a greater value to Bharti’s customers.”

The partnership will work across several areas, according to the two companies, including developing bespoke software to dramatically improve network experience, leveraging advanced digital tools including machine learning, big data, and building customized tools to improve network planning based on every customer’s device experience.

The capacity to identify, monitor and deliver improvements to the network experience on an individual device basis will be a first in India, helped by SK Telecom’s global leadership in this area.

The two companies will also collaborate on an on-going basis to evolve standards for 5G, network functions virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), and jointly work towards building an enabling ecosystem for the introduction of these technologies in the Indian context.

“We are extremely delighted to announce this partnership with the world’s leading operator when it comes to technology understanding and expertise. This partnership will bring a dramatically improved experience to Airtel customers in India by leveraging the expertise of a company that has built one of the best mobile broadband networks in the world,” Said Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel.

“Strong partnerships have been a hallmark of Airtel’s growth journey and we are proud to have always looked ahead to bring the latest technology to India,” he added. “With SK Telecom’s clear and undisputed leadership in technology, this is one partnership that will decisively change the game in India and put the country at par with the most advanced broadband nations in the world.”

Nokia and China Unicom are conducting a live trial in China Unicom's commercial network using the Nokia Virtualized Services Router (VSR). The trial involves more than 5,000 residential subscribers and allows China Unicom to simplify and accelerate the delivery of residential broadband using a new, agile and flexible network which is based on virtualized network functions (VNFs).

The initial trial is being carried out in the province of Shandong and will expand to the other parts of the country over the next two years as it evolves to the next phase, which will include delivery of IPTV services.

China Unicom is adopting Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to enhance efficiency, agility, openness and scaling capabilities to evolve to a cloud-ready network. The successful trial of the industry-proven Nokia VSR will increase operational efficiency and enable faster creation and delivery of new services.

The trial uses the Nokia VSR as a next-generation, virtualized Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) for residential subscriber management functions and advanced service capabilities. As part of its initiative to transform its metro service edge, China Unicom plans to migrate massive BNG services to the virtualized platform to leverage the opportunities of the cloud era.

"We are proud to be a part of China Unicom's initiative to evolve its metro edge to a cloud-centric architecture,” said Sri Reddy, head of IP Routing and Packet Core business at Nokia. “The Nokia VSR provides delivery of broad and rich virtualized IP edge applications with superior performance and enhanced scalability. Upon completion of this network transformation project, China Unicom will ensure increased operational efficiency and deliver a superior customer experience for its subscribers."

US telecoms giant AT&T successfully completed the first of a multi-phase trial testing 400 gigabit Ethernet data speeds. This brings AT&T one step closer to quadrupling network speeds for businesses.

In the field trial, AT&T established a 400GbE connection between New York and Washington, D.C. This proved the AT&T nationwide software-centric network is ready for next-generation speeds.

400GbE end-to-end service was transported across the network, which was carrying live traffic. A software-defined network (SDN) controller created a service along the direct path between the two cities, and through software control rerouted the service to a second path to simulate a response to a network failure.  

Late last year, AT&T announced its intention to be the first in the industry to demonstrate 400GbE service across our production network, aligning with its shift toward a software-centric network.

Traffic on the AT&T network continues to grow. 400GbE speeds will allow AT&T business customers to transport massive amounts of data faster than ever. That also means faster uploads and downloads and ultra-fast video streaming.

"Our approach to roll out the next generation of Ethernet speeds is working. We continue to see enormous data growth on our network, fueled by video. And this will help with that growth," said Rick Hubbard, senior vice president, AT&T Network Product Management.

Next-generation speeds like 400GbE can help transform the way AT&T’s customers do business.

The company is moving on to the second phase – a 400GbE end-to-end service transported across the AT&T OpenROADM metro network to the customer. This will show the network is ready for 400GbE to serve customers in metro areas.

Phase 3 will test the first instance of a 400GbE open router platform. The "disaggregated router" platform uses merchant silicon and open source software – another industry first.

Nokia announced that it has been selected by Vodafone to be a global supplier of software-defined networking (SDN). Nuage Networks - the Nokia SDN venture - will be the supplier for SDN for the datacenter. As part of the selection, a VPN+ live pilot project with Vodafone is also underway, which will demonstrate the benefits of SD-WAN in providing leading-edge NFV and IoT applications.

The Nuage Networks Virtualized Service Platform (VSP), which will be at the heart of the Vodafone deployments, is the only network virtualization, SDN and automation solution offering a single framework to provide policy-based automation across both the datacenter and WAN. It empowers customers to transform their IT and build truly automated and agile application delivery and cloud networks.

The end-to-end policy-based automation provided by VSP, across datacenter, WAN sites and public cloud providers, delivers synergy across network offerings, such as MPLS VPN and hybrid WAN services as well as hosted cloud services, by leading service providers such as Vodafone and other large cloud providers.

"We look forward to working closely with Nokia on the successful roll-out of our Vodafone Ocean implementation and our new SD-WAN with our enterprise customers," said David Amzallag, head of network virtualization, Vodafone Group. "An open, multi-vendor SDN infrastructure is key for delivering better, faster and smarter services to our customers."

The Nuage Networks VSP solution enables high-performance, reliable SDN and policy-based automation for cloud deployments at scale, and provides seamless virtual overlay networking across on-premises and public cloud environments as well as remote WAN sites for end-to-end automation and application delivery.

It also supports a range of cloud orchestration platforms for infrastructure-wide automation, including OpenStack and CloudStack open source platforms, and it works across heterogeneous application platforms and workload types, including virtual machines, containers and bare metal applications to minimize disruption and accelerate cloud-readiness.

The data center and cloud networking framework of the VSP - Virtualized Cloud Services (VCS) - automates the configuration, management and optimization of virtual networks, including security services that provide tenant isolation and access controls to individual applications and workloads.

A centralized policy manager and SDN controller automate configuration and tuning of network and security devices, accelerating IT tasks, increasing scale and reducing errors. VCS integrates with a broad range of open source reference architectures and management solutions to deliver virtual networking and automation in a highly scalable cloud environment.

"Nokia started the SDN/NFV journey with Vodafone more than three years ago, so we are now honored to be selected as a partner and to be awarded as a global supplier for SDN solutions," said Sunil Khandekar, founder and chief executive officer of Nuage Networks from Nokia. "We are pleased that our Nuage Networks solution is Vodafone's top selection to transform their datacenter applications and VPN+ service offer with the highest levels of agility, simplicity and automated flexibility for all users."

Australia’s largest telecom company Telstra announced a strategic partnership with US-based VeloCloud Networks, the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN (software defined wide area networks) company, which simplifies and automates enterprise branch networking. The partnership includes an investment by Telstra Ventures in VeloCloud as part of their latest funding round.

According to Mark Sherman, Managing Director of Telstra Ventures, the investment was consistent with Telstra's overall network strategy, with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) increasingly playing a role in offering greater network flexibility and agility for enterprise customers.

"We expect SDN will continue to transform enterprise networking around the world and VeloCloud SD-WAN can help companies achieve more agile and responsive networks as well as reduce costs," said Mr. Sherman.

"We are excited about the opportunity to work with VeloCloud on solutions for our enterprise customers, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region where their technology can help businesses manage their networks in dynamic environments across multiple locations. Our first step will be to offer VeloCloud technology to customers in mainland China."

Telstra's joint venture in China, Telstra PBS, is a provider of enterprise services to customers in mainland China and is adding VeloCloud SD-WAN solutions to its product suite.

"VeloCloud is very pleased that Telstra is an investor and partner in our recently concluded funding round," said Sanjay Uppal, CEO and Co-founder of VeloCloud. "We see great opportunities in Asia where more businesses are leveraging both public and private networks and relying on cloud services and applications. We look forward to working closely with Telstra given the strength of their network, customer relationships and experience in the Asia-Pacific region."

VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN enables enterprises to securely support application growth, network agility and simplified branch and end-point implementations while delivering optimized access to cloud services, private data centers and enterprise applications. It enables both enterprises and service providers to benefit from the multi-tenant cloud gateway architecture and supports real-time applications over private, broadband and wireless links.

Thailand’s second largest mobile operator, dtac, part of the Telenor Group will become the first mobile operator in Thailand to implement a software-defined network (SDN)-ready IP/optical network, according to Nokia, which is supplying IP/optical products to dtac for its backbone network.

Nokia says the network will eventually deliver ultra-broadband mobile access to more than 40 percent of Thailand's population. “The number of mobile subscribers in Thailand is increasing rapidly, stimulating greater demand for advanced networks to support surging data consumption,” says Nokia.

“dtac needed a core network to handle the increased data demand, but also with the open interfaces and the programmability necessary to support a migration to SDN.”

Nokia is supplying its 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS) and the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) to replace dtac's existing IP core routing and dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) infrastructure to “provide the capacity and capabilities required to efficiently address growth in demand, and lay the foundation for an SDN infrastructure.”

The deployment also includes Nokia's security gateway for dtac's LTE network. “Combined, these platforms ensure that dtac is well positioned to meet customer bandwidth requirements into the future while improving network flexibility and reliability,” Nokia says,

dtac CTO, Prathet Tankuranun, said: "Over the last two years we've seen demand for mobile broadband grow exponentially. As we prepare for future advanced technologies we've made a strategic choice for an SDN-ready IP/optical network because it gives us the control and agility needed to run an efficient network that can rapidly adjust to evolving demand patterns. This deployment with Nokia is an important next step in our migration towards full SDN automation."

Sebastien Laurent, head of Nokia Thailand, said the upgrade would “allow dtac to implement on-demand services while also easing operation and maintenance demands."

SK Telecom and Nokia claim to have deployed the world’s first cloud-based SDRAN (Software-Defined RAN) - also known as Cloud RAN - in a commercial network. They say that, by taking advantage of virtualized functions it is able to deliver new network scalability and elasticity, enhancing quality of service and network stability.

SDRAN enables key mobile communication network functions to be implemented in software applications running in a virtualized environment on general-purpose servers in a data centre.

This enables network capacity to be scaled more rapidly and for multiple connectivity scenarios to be efficiently deployed without immediate additional investments in transport or baseband capacity.

According to SK Telekom, by applying general IT technologies to an interface as well as base station processing, the new technology is expected to accelerate 5G network innovation that evolves beyond All IP toward All IT.

“SDRAN will be able to offer a variety of third party edge services in connection with MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) that provide localized communication services,” SK Telekom says. “And, since the network is implemented by software, it is easier and quicker to add new network functions. This would significantly shorten the time for delivering new technologies to customers.”

Frank Weyerich, head of Mobile Networks products at Nokia said: “This is a major milestone for Nokia; together with SK Telecom, we have for the first time implemented our AirScale Cloud RAN technology in a commercial network. We are paving the way towards 5G, and cloud-based radio networks delivering the scalability and flexibility required to allow operators such as SK Telecom to meet the future data demands of customers, enabling new levels of user experience at minimal cost and maximum operational efficiency.”