Sedona Systems launched its new Hierarchical Network Controller product at this year’s OFC conference.
The product is designed to automatically discover, provision and optimise L0-L3 services across multilayer, multivendor, multi-domain networks, affording providers next generation software-defined networks as well as automated service creation and assurance. The controller is ‘hierarchical’ because it exists at the top level of the network control layer above domain controllers from packet and transport vendors.
It presents a single interface and simplified view of the network to service orchestrators and OSS products, and provides end-end network control and policy management by interacting with domain controllers from multiple IP and transport vendors. This results in a service-aware network that is able to provision and assure based on the unique needs of each.
In initial implementations, service providers are using the new NetFusion product as a single ‘pane of glass’ for provisioning L0-3 services, without having to configure every layer, domain and vendor separately, and allowing services to be provisioned in minutes. By contrast, manual multilayer provisioning processes that are used in current networks can take weeks to complete.
Ori Gerstel, CTO at Sedona commented: ‘Service-aware networks are becoming particularly important as new consumer and enterprise applications require transport networks to efficiently support a range of different service types with widely varying bandwidth, performance, and availability requirements. They will become even more valuable as 5G applications mature.’