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Verizon tags majors to craft SDN future

We've written a document, that's gotta be a good start

Verizon has taken the leap into the world of software-defined networking, announcing a strategy and its initial partner list for a multi-year rollout.

For now, the partner list for the giant's umpteenth network transformation strategy are Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Networks, Cisco, Ericsson and Juniper Networks.

The company told FierceWireless there's going to be room for the upstarts and challengers of the SDN world, with a total partner list of 20 vendors. Others, network planning veep Brian Higgins said, will be announced in the future.

However, those non-traditional players will be working to an architecture and interface spec crafted by the majors, with Verizon saying it's been working with the aforementioned partners on “a comprehensive SDN network architecture document, which includes all interface specifications and reference architectures plus requirements for both the control layer and forwarding box functions”.

Getting such a diverse bunch of antagonists partners playing nice should have industry-wide payoffs in the form of interoperability and interface standardisation.

Citing the usual operational efficiency and customer agility that's the backbone of the SDN pitch, Verizon's canned statement says it expects to get:

  • Elastic, scalable, network-wide service creation and near real-time service delivery; and
  • Operational agility via dynamic resource allocation and management as well as automation of network operations.

The outfit already has SDN experience in its data centre operations, and in labs in California (San Jose), Florida (Tampa) and Massachusetts (Waltham).

The SDN deployment will start with the company's IP multimedia subsystem, and the evolved packet core behind its LTE network.

SDN will also be important to Verizon's Internet of Things plans: the small chunks of data generated by sensors'n'stuff is almost unnoticeable as network traffic, but can put extra stress on signalling. ®

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