The Chinese hypercloud provider is looking to SDN to provide scalability with quality of service for millions of users.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

February 18, 2016

2 Min Read
Tencent Ups SDN Ante, Joins OpenDaylight

Chinese hypercloud provider Tencent signaled a deeper commitment to SDN this week, joining the OpenDaylight Project at the Silver level.

Tencent Inc. , which provides a variety of services for millions of users, including QQ, Weixin/WeChat for communications, Qzone for social networking, as well as gaming, information and video, is looking to SDN for scalability combined with high quality of service, Tom Bie, VP of technology and engineering group at Tencent, said in an OpenDaylight statement Wednesday.

Tencent is already using SDN for data center interconnectivity, Internet connectivity and data center networking.

Tencent went public with its OpenDaylight commitment in July. Neela Jacques, executive director of the OpenDaylight Project, described Tencent's SDN installation in a blog post then. He said Tencent has asked partners to standardize on OpenDaylight for SDN controllers. (See Tencent Goes to 11 With OpenDaylight.)

SDN is gaining ground in other places in China as well. China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL) is using Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)'s Nuage Networks technology for applications development and testing on an internal private cloud architecture. China Telecom Corp. Ltd. (NYSE: CHA) is also using Nuage. (See Nuage Signs China Mobile for Developer SDN and China Telecom Taps Nuage SDN for Public Clouds.)

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) signed deals with China Mobile and China Unicom Ltd. (NYSE: CHU) to provide cloud-based networking, including NFV and Nuage's SDN. AlcaLu was at that time the parent of Nuage, before Alcatel-Lucent was acquired by Nokia. Two separate deals were involved valued at up to 4.53 billion Chinese yuan (€656 million) and RMB3.59 billion (€520 million) for China Mobile and China Unicom respectively. (See Alcatel-Lucent Lands Deals at China Mobile, China Unicom.)

Also, China Telecom and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are partnering on NFV testing. (See China Telecom, HPE, Open Joint NFV Lab.)

The Tencent deal is part of OpenDaylight Project's Chinese outreach. The organization participated in a community day at an OpenDaylight Bootcamp and Hackathon event in Shenzhen hosted by the China Open SDN (COS) committees, which include leaders from major Chinese Internet companies, service providers and networking equipment manufacturers; COS also hosts OpenDaylight User Groups in five cities in China. OpenDaylight will co-host a joint Open Source Networking track with the OPNFV Project as part of the China SDN and NFV Conference April 12-13 in Beijing.

— Mitch Wagner, Circle me on Google+ Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profileFollow me on Facebook, West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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