Stephan Scholz – “My most important insight from SDN NFV Congress”

Layer123 conference is one of the largest and most important events focusing mainly on the lower layer of SDN and NFV networking technologies as the name of the event suggests. In those 5 days at The Hague, between October 8^th and October 13^th, the leading vendors, suppliers, network and service management companies and large system integrators companies, gathered to explore the new trends and developments in the virtual world. Started last year, the SDN/NFV-architecture was the clear and major focus of this conference. The major difference for this year is that the very early enthusiasm on SDN and NFV deployments has given way to a more realistic approach. It is clear that the SDN/NFV technology will dominate the communication industry and it is the chosen architecture of future networks. However, it will be deployed a bit slower than expected and the networks will be for long time Hybrid Networks i.e. Networks with a mix of multivendor legacy equipment and next generation virtual solutions.

To back up my observation, here are two quotes I heard from 2 different visitors at Atrinet’s booth during the conference – both stated more or less the same concept: “The Hybrid Networks are there but there is no real plan on how to handle them during the transition period. Your offer of NetACE might be lacking of marketing visibility but it is one of the most interesting solutions we have seen at this event. Your solution is taking Traditional networks and combine those with virtual networks in order to bring a real value to network operators”. Both persons where network management experts from leading large vendors.

The reason I am quoting this is because it covers exactly the same experience I had during this event.

It is one of the most powerful offers NetACE can bring to the table: opening the complete legacy network to be integrated with SDN/NFV-architecture. For combining the two types of networks, there is a need to be able to communicate with the already installed devices and ability to convert this communication to the way virtual devices are communicating with the orchestration and control of SDN and NFV networks. With more than 1000 different devices from more than 50 Vendors, you hardly find a device or a vendor, which has not been modeled from NetACE – as I already mentioned in some former BLOGs. So NetACE can take a huge role in the transition of todays’ networks. With NetACE, you have a real hybrid solution, which allows you to manage multi-vendor legacy networks perfectly including a complete life-cycle orchestration and a complete Network Management system (also can be used as OSS-in a box for smaller type of networks). In addition, the inherent capabilities of NetACE include:

• to either include VNFs (created by some 3^rd party Service Orchestration Engine) and manage them as every PNF or vice-versa
• to make every legacy equipment SDN-ready

All this has been described in my earlier BLOGs in very detail. On this event, we could see and hear how all supported NetACE use cases are playing together perfectly and bring a true value for every Network Service Provider, large System Integrator or Vendor, if they are asked to manage parts or all of the network, with equipment for several vendors and from different technologies (classic or SDN/NFV).

You might want to verify the 2 quotes from above yourself so feel free to contact us, request a demo or a free trial – more information can be found on Atrinet’s website (https://www.atrinet.com/).