Coriant, Aricent Collaborate to Drive SDN/NFV Capabilities for Operators

Aricent, a global design and engineering company, has announced that Coriant, a supplier of packet optical, IP, and SDN solutions to Tier 1 global service providers and web-scale Internet operators, will integrate its NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework to accelerate and power the Transcend™ SDN Solution and deliver end-to-end NFV/SDN capabilities for network operators.

Thanks to this collaboration, operators will now be able to launch virtualized value-added services faster and secure new streams.

According to IHS Markit, the global NFV market will be worth $15.5 billion[1] by 2020 and over 70 percent will originate from different market segments, primarily VNFs (Virtual Network Functions). Aricent’s NFV MANO platform is an enriched module that has been designed to provide a robust solution for managing complex virtualized network functions and maximize the value of operator’s NFV deployment. Coriant’s Transcend™ SDN Solution unleashes SDN and NFV capabilities with a truly multi-layer, open, programmable, and automated application environment to deliver complete network control and maximize value. The joint solution opens possibilities for operators to provide low latency connectivity solutions for public safety, connected and autonomous cars by partnering with automotive companies, connected homes, and industrial IoT.

Aricent’s solution provides the flexibility of leveraging the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) such as OpenStack and VMware services for deploying carrier-grade NFV solutions through a wide range of interfaces including a programmable interface for end communication with VNFs. It is intuitive, easy to use and can help in designing complex network deployment scenarios easily. Operator can define KPIs and co-relate alarms with NFV Infrastructure statistics. Aricent also offers a pre-packaged virtualization infrastructure solution based on the ETSI NFV architecture supporting both OpenStack and VMware to enable customers to rapidly virtualize and deploy network functions and applications.

“This partnership reinforces Coriant's commitment to open networking and industry collaboration to enhance its customers' service delivery capabilities in multi-vendor, multi-layer, and multi-domain environments. Aricent's MANO framework is a perfect example of industry innovation in SDN-enabled on-demand service orchestration and automated provisioning in a multi-vendor optical networking environment,” said Filipe Caetano, Vice President, Product Management, Coriant. "We're elated to partner with Aricent in this important technology journey and help advance the state of cloud applications drive increased demand for on-demand capabilities."

“The virtualization market is experiencing explosive growth. Strong enterprise and communications service provider demand is dramatically disrupting the traditional branch-office router market,” said Dietmar Wendt, President, Communications business unit, Aricent. “Aricent’s NFV-MANO solution pushes the cloud journey forward by teaching a network to ‘self-steer’. VNF Management is of particular interest to businesses that are moving their applications to the cloud and those with multiple branches that want to utilize high speed off-the-shelf internet connectivity but still want to have a service level agreement (SLA) or control over those links,” Wendt said.

Besides the MANO framework, Aricent also offers a range of component VNF for OpenFlow, Layer2 switching, IPv4 / IPv6 forwarding / routing, NAT (Network Address Translation), Firewall, MPLS, Security, Tunneling, subscriber management, address management and authentication / authorization as well as Composite VNF frameworks for vCPE, vRouter, vFirewall, vBNG, vOLT and vSG (Subscriber Gateway). Aricent’s partnerships with market-leading whitebox hardware or SmartNIC platforms help OEMs a jumpstart their product modernization initiatives including NFV & SDN.