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#SDNShowcase: Carrier WAN and NFV

May 28, 2015

A sneak peek into the Carrier WAN and NFV categories at the SDN Solutions Showcase during the Open Networking Summit. 

In a few short weeks, Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2015 will be upon us! ONF is excited for this year’s summit – especially because we are co-sponsoring the SDN Solutions Showcase along with ONS. Eighteen companies will demonstrate real-world SDN use cases from six categories during the showcase, and a listing of the participating companies can be found here. Now that the participants and categories are set, we want to give ONF blog readers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at each category with a three-part series over the next couple of weeks.

In this first post of the series, we’re lifting the curtain a bit to give you a glimpse of what will be on display from the Carrier WAN and NFV categories.

During the SDN Solutions Showcase, four companies’ deployment demos fall under the Carrier WAN category: AT&T, Huawei, Internet2, NTT Communications and the Open Network Operating System (ONOS). These companies will demonstrate how SDN is changing carrier Ethernet and its services by lowering cost, increasing management control, and reducing solution complexity and speed to deployment. Global telco operators will show how they have implemented SDN into their networks, including L1 – L7 switching; end-to-end orchestration of optical network connectivity services from data centers across the WAN to enterprises; IPv6 transition technologies, displaying the value and flexibility of open Northbound APIs; among other carrier-grade use cases.

We’ve seen great interest over the years for NFV and how it is providing new and exciting virtual network functions (VNF) that could radically change the way services and applications are delivered. However, many questions remain pertaining to NFV orchestration, management, and migration paths from traditional network management, which need to be addressed before we transition to full-blown NFV. Six demonstrations from Huawei, Luxoft, the University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU), UBIqube, the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS), and ONF will help answer these remaining questions about NFV by featuring several important building blocks and complete solutions that demonstrate both the promise and potential of NFV during the showcase.

Next week we will give you a sneak peek into the SDN Security and Data Center categories, so be sure to check back in. For more details, please visit http://opennetsummit.org/conference/, and we look forward to seeing you at the SDN Solutions Showcase at ONS2015 in June!

- Dan Pitt, Executive Director

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dan Pitt
Dan Pitt