CENX, Brocade, Red Hat, RIFT.io collaborate to set up SDNFV Innovation Lab

BENGALURU: Canada-based CENX, the global leader of orchestrated service assurance and management solutions for physical and virtualized networks, is collaborating with Brocade, Red Hat, and RIFT.io to showcase end-to-end service management capabilities over hybrid network infrastructure in its SDNFV innovation lab.

This initiative highlights how interoperability between vendors can help accelerate time to market for service providers who are seeking to efficiently operationalize their Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments using Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) capabilities.

CENX’s SDNFV innovation lab provides an ecosystem, aligned with the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) principle of providing data center economies and cloud agility to service providers. It showcases streamlined operations and real-world implementation of leading-edge use cases, such as enterprise services using virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE), VoLTE using virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), and Software-defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).

The multi-vendor environment includes CENX Exanova Service Intelligence , Brocade vRouter, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and RIFT.io RIFT.ware NFV Orchestrator and VNF Manager. The lab builds on CENX’s previously announced demonstrations with other partner companies.

Exanova Service Intelligence provides the unified LSO interface to the multiple components within an NFV architecture – NFV Orchestrator, Virtualized Network Function (VNF) Manager, VNFs, Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) – as well as physical network functions (PNFs). It continuously ingests and analyzes network data to provide a real-time view of the state of services in relation to dynamic SDNFV network topology, with supporting KPI metrics. Operators can thus quickly navigate their hybrid network, isolate faults, and trigger automated workflows for proactive service management and assurance.

“Many service providers are on an aggressive path to execute business transformation strategies, which are centered on next-generation SDN and NFV technologies,” said Andrew McDonald, Senior Vice President of Core Products, CENX. “By bringing together leading vendors to pre-integrate comprehensive solutions across complex, hybrid physical and virtualized infrastructure, we can help service providers more quickly realize the opex-saving benefits of these innovations.”

“Brocade is pleased to be collaborating with leading vendors to combine complementary technologies with the intention of building end-to-end service orchestration and management solutions for SDN and NFV deployments,” said Michael Bushong, vice president of product management, Software Networking at Brocade. “This can help operators truly evolve their network infrastructure to deliver on-demand services to their customers.”

“As communications service providers work to modernize their networks and introduce new services to their customers, SDN and NFV initiatives are gaining momentum,” said Mike Werner, senior director, Global Technology Ecosystems, Red Hat. “And, OpenStack offers a highly scalable and reliable platform for SDN and NFV. Red Hat is thrilled to work with companies like Brocade, CENX, and Rift.io to offer a solution for SDN and NFV deployments on OpenStack.”

“Efficient and highly scalable network management and orchestration require the delivery of both service fulfillment and service performance monitoring,” said Vincent Spinelli, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at RIFT.io. “We are demonstrating the real-world viability of this end-to-end solution inside the SDNFV innovation lab with our collaboration with CENX, which has the potential to accelerate SDN and NFV interest among service providers and enterprises, globally.”