Huawei Unveils SoftCOM-Based SDN Products

Huawei is building out its software-defined networking (SDN) portfolio with several products and technologies announced at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. Each of the technologies is based on the SoftCOM framework.

Included in the Huawei SDN announcement are:

The SoftCOM-based products continue on the product portfolio Huawei first unveiled in 2012. The technology—and Huawei’s strategy around it—was designed with carriers in mind. Specifically, SoftCOM helps carriers to increase efficiency, reduce costs and create new business opportunities, according to Huawei.

According to Huawei, it has been continuously conducting research and development efforts around SDN to solve carriers’ problems in a world of cloud, virtualization and ICT.

Its SDN-based IP and optimical product, which was showcased for the first time at ONS, adopts a unified network controller to automatically detect and maintain resources at the IP and optical layers along with resources between the layers. It provides automatic deployments of services routes over layers to expedite provisioning and eliminating the complex horizontal signalling. The end goal is to simplify the network.

The new NG-VN is a virtualized E2P IP network product that enables virtualization of all devices and links. It also provides infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and network-as-a-service (NaaS) features.

According to Huawei, “The SDN flow engine has been a key breakthrough for the SDN algorithm as it calculates the best route for a service according to requirements on service quality (bandwidth/latency), and quickly detects dynamic traffic changes to automatically adjust network traffic.” It enables the entire network to operate at its optimum state and provides more services than the traditional network, the company noted.

As for POF technology, it’s a continuation of an announcement Huawei made at ONS 2013. Huawei’s POF offerings unveiled this year include POF-based data centers, source path routing and content-based fast path load balancing.