Alcatel-Lucent has launched what it is calling the world’s first carrier-grade SDN platform, designed to bridge the gap between service automation and network control and allow operators to accelerate the rollout new services.
The vendor said its new Network Services Platform (NSP) is able to provision IP, Ethernet and optical services across all network layers over any vendor’s equipment, meaning operators can activate new services “in seconds”.
According to A-L, its NSP provides operators with a real-time network view across IP and optical networks allowing for real-time, network-wide path computation and optimisation across IP and optical layers. The NSP is also compatible with virtualised and hybrid networks.
As a result, service providers can create new offerings over 58 percent faster while using 56 percent fewer resources, the vendor claimed.
Basil Alwan, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Routing and Transport business, said A-L’s NSP offered “a simple interface that can deal with the complexity of network control across multiple technologies.”
The platform will be commercially available in June of this year.
Dana Cooperson, Research Director of Network Software and Virtualisation at Analysys Mason, said: “End-users want the cloud experience for everything they do that requires a network connection. However, delivering on-demand services while efficiently managing network resources is a huge challenge for service providers, particularly with their business customers.
“Alcatel-Lucent’s NSP solves this demand-supply dilemma by combining service automation with network traffic engineering across the IP, MPLS, Ethernet, and optical layers, a comprehensive approach to carrier SDN…bridging the services-resource gap and enabling efficient use of network resources in the face of dynamically changing, on-demand network service requests.”
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