JOHN WILLIAMSON VIRTUAL NETWORKS
Virtual Reality
TAKING CONTROL OF OPTICAL NETWORKS
and subtle variations within a particular API or protocol, is probably too high for developers within the ecosystem to keep up with, given the levels of return they can currently expect to see on their investments. “Certainly this flux is too rapid for the traditional standards development organisations and, often, particular proprietary solutions become de facto standards.” Enrico reckons further work on virtualisation is required in several areas, including: scalability, both up and out; improving infrastructure and service instance monitoring in the disaggregated environment; and authentication, authorisation and accounting. “And putting in the right hooks to make billing and revenue collection work,” he added.
Software defined networks, all-optical switching and network functions virtualisation are increasingly the only way forward for managing communications that are more complex and faster than ever.
John Williamson reports. JOHN WILLIAMSON
V irtualisation, in forms Virtualisation (NFV), has become considerably more than a “nice-to-have” capability of optical networks. As the Internet of Everything, next generation mobile, video streaming and cloud computing move such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions into a higher gear, escalating capacity and connectivity demands are beginning to make obsolete traditional physical methods of dimensioning, deploying, provisioning, operating, monitoring, re-configuring and restoring optical infrastructures. “It means we have to re-define how networks are built and operated, and we believe that really has to happen all the way down to the physical layer,” said Dr Stephen Alexander, Ciena SVP and CTO, in a March webcast introducing that company’s Liquid Spectrum portfolio of optical networking tools. “Clearly the network itself should become a programmable platform, and one that can be responsive to change in demand and change in the applications space.”
MIXED FORTUNES Notwithstanding the remaining
Meantime, Nick Parsons, Senior VP Engineering and Technology at Huber+Suhner Polatis, believes other virtualisation benefits include standardisation, which promotes multi- vendor interoperability and reduces vendor lock-in, and granular control of the entire network, which can enable the development and commercialisation of new and unique services. For the latter, Parsons draws a parallel with the smart mobile device application ecosystem. “Expose enough flexible APIs to the network in a su ciently-controlled manner to ensure that the underlying platforms can be reliably operated, and this may stimulate the emergence of an array of hitherto unimagined, compelling and profitable network-centric services by app developers that are probably not hidebound by more traditional network operational concerns.”
challenges, in some particulars the virtualisation process is already quite advanced in optical networks. “Arguably some of the aspects of virtualisation, are already well established in optical networking, and transport networking more generally, and can claim to have been so for a long time,” points out Parsons. He o ers as examples logically centralised management and control functions, and the ability to partition them so that di erent groups of users can concurrently manage their own ‘slices’ of a common set of network resources. But virtualisation is not uniform across the optical networking market landscape. “In Internet Content Providers progress has been rapid and pretty comprehensive,” said Bennett. “ICPs are not starting with any legacy infrastructure or processes. Even if they were, the dramatic growth they are driving means that they are more willing to simply overbuild new network technologies and operational methodologies if these o er significant benefits.” It’s a di erent deal for longer- established service providers. “These companies have massive installed bases of services that represent their revenue stream,” said Bennett. “They cannot simply unplug these customers and move them to other architectures because they’d go out of business.” The harnessing of optical networking and virtualisation is not confined to transport, wide area and metro markets. Optical technology is a major facilitator of data centre intranets and Data Centre Interconnect (DCI). According to new findings from ACG Research, global optical DCI equipment revenue was $467.1 million in 4Q 2016, and exceeded $1.69 billion in 2016, with 63.5% year-
WORK IN PROGRESS Although hardware and software
standardisation is one of the positives of virtualisation, it does bring its own non- trivial challenges. Standards proliferation is one. For example, Bennett recalls that SDN started o as a simple set of OpenFlow protocols that was trying to solve a simple problem: the high cost, and closed nature of branded routers in university networks. However, as the number of problems that SDN tried to solve increased, there was a proliferation of APIs, protocols and implementations. “All of them seem to be open, but none of them seem to interoperate,” Bennett contends. “It’s possible we’re at peak proliferation today, and what will follow is a natural selection and culling of less popular protocols and APIs.” Dr Michael Enrico, Polatis Network Solutions Architect, believes the current flux in the array of software interfaces,
VIRTUALISATION VIRTUES At the macro level, notes Geo
Bennett, Infinera’s Director, Solutions and Technology, virtualisation allows machines to control the network and, as networks grow to massive scale and complexity, the need to take the human element out of the loop becomes critical. Virtualised end-to-end management can also boost operational responsiveness. David Altstaetter, VP Product Marketing for Calient Technologies argues, “SDN will provide much more holistic network analytics which are much more powerful and informative than looking at individual network layers/domains.”
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| ISSUE 9 | Q2 2017
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