Service providers and cloud builders alike are under tremendous pressure to create new revenue opportunities to keep pace with customer demands, all while attempting to scale their existing networks. Virtuora NC enables service providers to consistently deliver profitable services that are innovative, differentiated, and first-to-market.
“Service providers need networks that are architected for continuous improvement,” said Igor Bergman, Vice President and head of the Software Business Unit at Fujitsu Network Communications. “Virtuora NC is highly scalable and makes networks programmable, in turn helping providers reduce costs while increasing service velocity.”
Virtuora NC and its supporting applications enable key goals of customers looking to implement a software-defined network:
- Improving time-to-market for new products and features through abstraction at the device, service and network layers, enabling a faster return on product investment
- Delivering rapid service innovation via an open control environment with distinct separation of the controller, southbound and application layers
- Automating process integration and improving information access to enable multilayer design, resource utilization and elimination of slow and error-prone manual handoffs
- Eliminating traditional OSS development cycles through the prolific use of YANG modeling and abstraction
- Providing open, standards-based interfaces to key components that reduce cycle times and improve network agility
Virtuora NC can be visualized as three separate ‘layers’. The open SDN control framework layer is built on OpenDaylight (ODL); Fujitsu has created additional abstraction, or layers, on the ODL platform that maximizes the built-in components of ODL without attaching them to application or device specifications.
This distinct separation of applications, controller infrastructure and southbound interfaces provides customers the ability to leverage Agile and IT DevOps methodologies for maintenance and upgrades, or even migrate to another controller platform, with minimal impact to the interfaces and applications running on the controller. The benefit of this open and modular controller framework is reduced testing and full-feature continuity – regardless of network traffic.
The interfaces to the controlled network elements make up the ‘southbound’ layer. Those interfaces are abstracted via YANG models and XML, and support TL1, NETCONF, and other management protocols, as well as being architected for multivendor support.
Control, management, fulfillment, service assurance functions and northbound interfaces make up the ‘application’ layer of Virtuora NC. In keeping with the modular design of Virtuora, the applications are also self-contained and provide a set of external interfaces to support data collection, analytics, and available inventory.
Virtuora NC delivers on the openness of the ODL platform to support seamless integration of multiple layers with multi-vendor devices and third-party application development. All the data stores in the ODL database as well as other services of ODL can be accessed by any application via standardized REST-based APIs and standard data-modeling approaches. As a result, anyone capable of developing an application for ODL can develop and implement applications on Virtuora NC.
"We are glad to see Fujitsu delivering game-changing innovation in the market leveraging the OpenDaylight Project," said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. "This release delivers on Fujitsu’s stated strategy to deliver solutions that leverage de-facto standard open source platforms and meet their customers’ needs."
Virtuora NC supporting applications provide a rich ecosystem that offers multiple choices in service creation and operations efficiency: Dynamic Service Activation and Service Restoration, Path Computation and Resource Discovery.
- Dynamic Service Activation and Service Restoration enables service providers to provision and restore services automatically or on-demand
- The Path Computation application dynamically computes an optimal path based on routing constraints, such as available bandwidth, network faults, per-link and full path latency, and diversity
- After a network has been installed and commissioned, the Resource Discovery application automatically discovers all the topology elements, including nodes, links, and equipment. Resource Discovery updates the network inventory state to indicate that resources are installed and ready for service
