Ciena Unveils OpenDaylight-Based SDN Controller

Ciena is looking to make the wide-area networks more easily programmable with a portfolio of software-defined network offerings that include a controller and applications based on the OpenDaylight framework.

Ciena officials said the Agility software lineup, unveiled June 9, will enable network operators to more easily provision their multi-vendor infrastructures, improve efficiencies and more quickly roll out new virtualized services, which will help drive revenue growth. The new offerings leverage Ciena’s OP network architecture and enable the network to dynamically respond to changing demands from services and applications.

The company’s Agility Multilayer WAN Controller will enable network operators to more easily allocate resources, and it is designed to make WANs more scalable and resilient. It’s a focal point of the recently announced collaboration with Ericsson and is based on the framework being developed by the OpenDaylight Project, a year-old vendor-based consortium led by the likes of Cisco Systems, IBM and Microsoft that is developing an open platform for SDN and network-functions virtualization (NFV). Ciena is a member of OpenDaylight, which in February launched the first release of its platform, dubbed Hydrogen, and is working on the next generation, called Helium, which is expected in the fall.

“Ciena’s approach strongly embraces openness for a true, vendor-neutral ecosystem,” Francois Locoh-Donou, senior vice president of the company’s Global Products Group, said in a statement. “With our new Agility software portfolio, we are complementing an industry open framework with high-impact, analytics-based applications.”

The suite of SDN applications include Navigate, an analytics tool that gives users a complete view of all network resources and service demands; Protect for resiliency; and a network optimizer called Optimize. There also is V-WAN for bandwidth-on-demand brokering and scheduling, a network service health monitoring app call MyPerformance, MyPortal for users who need to request bandwidth, and MyAdapter for orchestrating bandwidth-on-demand across multiple network operators to the selected cloud provider.

V-WAN is available now and the other applications in the Agility suite are going into field trials with multiple service providers, according to Ciena officials.