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OFC: Huawei Eyes Transport SDN Deals

OFC 2015Huawei came to OFC this week armed with multiple transport SDN demonstrations, along with the belief it could complete ten or more transport SDN deployments for network operators by the end of this year.

Those deployments would be along the lines of the initial transport SDN deployment Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. completed with China Telecom last fall, according to Peter Ashwood-Smith, technical vice president of optical product line at Huawei. That deployment came after a much-publicized trial. (See China Telecom, Huawei Test SDN.)

Huawei has more than 40 customer engagements and projects related to its transport SDN developments, Ashwood-Smith says. The demonstrations at OFC are believed to be the first ones industry-wide that were developed through the open source Open Network Operating System group. They included a bandwidth-on-demand demonstration, and perhaps more significant, a demonstration of the concept of transport network virtualization and customization of network services. (See OFC: Huawei Demos IP+O, T-SDN Apps.)

"The virtual transport service represents the chopping up of the network into abstract pieces so that you can grow and shrink network services and partition the network on request," he says. "This is our customers turning the transport network over to their customers so they can grow and shrink a network including providing diverse connectivity options for network reliability."

Ashwood-Smith says Huawei's transport SDN capabilities are part of its broader move toward IP+Optical network integration, allowing customers to "treat two networks as one" through software capabilities. "It will allow them to save money in people and in hardware -- in line cards -- because it's being done at a bird's eye view, and can lead to better network utilization. Ultimately, it will lead to the creation of new services they haven't thought of yet."

Also at OFC, Huawei, along with everyone else, was discussing the move to 100G in the metro. The vendor showed off its multi-service metro edge platform, as well as a demonstration of using WDM-PON in mobile fronthaul applications. "We see fronthaul of CPRI traffic as one of the key metro apps," says Sean Long, director of product line management for transmission networks at Huawei.

 

One piece of hardware notably absent from Huawei's booth was a dedicated metro platform for data center interconnection applications (notable mainly because so many other optical vendors have announced similar products in recent months). "We are looking at the potential for a data center interconnection product. It's something we don't have now, but we know there is some demand to drive down cost for that purpose. We do believe that the metro 100G market will be bigger than the long-haul 100G market, and it is just starting now."



Source: http://www.lightreading.com/carrier-sdn/transport-sdn/ofc-huawei-eyes-transport-sdn-deals/d/d-id/714689

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