OIF, ONF List Vendors in Transport SDN DemoOIF, ONF List Vendors in Transport SDN Demo

The Optical Internetworking Forum and the Open Networking Foundation have announced the list of vendors participating in their global transport SDN demonstrations, currently drawing to a close inside four carrier labs on three continents.

The vendor participants announced today include ADVA Optical Networking , Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN), Coriant , FiberHome Technologies Group , Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo: 6702; London: FUJ; OTC: FJTSY), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , NEC Corp. (Tokyo: 6701) and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763). Most of the actual testing has been completed, according to some of the participants, with work now focused on producing a report due out next month.

The OIF and ONF first announced their joint demonstration plans in June. The companies joining the demonstration had a list of test cases to work with, such as testing OpenFlow extensions and northbound interfaces to transport SDN controllers in support of various functions, among other tests. (See OIF/ONF Efforts Could Speed Transport SDN and Cracking the Transport SDN Challenge.)

The list of involved vendors doesn't include many surprises, though a few notable names in the market of SDN solutions for service providers -- Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Cyan Inc. , for example -- appear not to have participated.

While an array of companies have been busy articulating their transport SDN strategies and highlighting their own demos and customer engagements in recent months, the global OIF/ONF demonstration is a "litmus test for who's talking about SDN, and who's actually doing it," says Jim Theodoras, senior technical marketing director at ADVA, "Unless you attend a plugfest, you have kind of lost the point of the open networking model."

Cyan, for its part, says the reason it didn't attend is that it's busy doing business. Joe Cumello, chief marketing officer at Cyan, wrote in an email to Light Reading, "At the end of the day, it comes down to resources. We’re highly focused right now on customer trials and engagements. That said, we have been following these developments," adding further, "because [Cyan's] Blue Planet is an open controller, there’s no reason it could not or would not interact with other standards-based controllers if/when required. So we welcome this effort, and would incorporate it if customers asked."

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ADVA also took today's news as an opportunity to unveil its new network hypervisor, which was used in two of the carrier labs -- one of them Verizon's -- involved in the demonstration. Theodoras says the hypervisor will be generally available later this year, and that the vendor has plans for some related announcements around the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in Germany next month. (See ADVA Participates in Global Transport SDN Demo.)

A hypervisor is a key part of an SDN architecture. It creates and manages virtual machines and provisions resources from the hardware that the virtual machines are running on.

— Dan O'Shea, Managing Editor, Light Reading