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FEATURE SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING


from optical systems vendor Infinera. An existing customer of Infinera, Pacnet’s


optical transport network is based on the vendor’s DTN-X packet-optical transport platform. Te network itself is a 100G optical network that links data centres in 15 cities across Asia via 46 000km of optical fibre. Te carrier also owns the EAC-C2C submarine cable system with 21 cable landing stations, making the network extremely meshed and resilient. ‘In the context of this announcement, that


mesh network becomes very important for us because it allows alternative paths through the


SDN is just another control plane, there’s nothing magical about it


network,’ said Geoff Bennett, director of solutions and technology at Infinera. ‘Pacnet has this nice meshed core network and they’re basically enabling customer to have more dynamic access to it.’ Pacnet has integrated Infinera’s OTS


soſtware into what it calls the Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN), which is a service delivery platform based on SDN principles. Te earlier versions of PEN were soſtware controlled at the Ethernet layer. Te new service, PEN 3.0, is a transport SDN-enabled version of this concept, allowing the optical paths on the network to be automated. Bennett said: ‘In the past, although the


Infinera network gave Pacnet a significant advantage in terms of flexibility, the process from a Pacnet point of view still had a lot of human intervention. Te customer would call Pacnet, they’d request a circuit, Pacnet would use the advantage of Infinera’s network, they’d turn up that capacity more quickly, but there was still a human in the process. Te big difference with this new approach is that we can eliminate that.’ Instead Pacnet’s customer gains access to a


self-service portal to book capacity on the network. Te customer can see end points, they can see the bandwidth that’s available, and they can express how long they want to use that service. Bennett likens it to calling a travel agent to


book a flight. Today most people prefer to go online, where they can quickly compare a number of airlines and within five minutes get


Infinera’s OTS software extends the PEN network as a service (NaaS) to the optical layer, offering nx10G today and 100G levels in the future


different prices from different airlines, allowing them to find a cheaper price for exactly the same service. Te self-service portal is the same, he says. It allows the customer a lot more control, and they’re able to get what they need at a lower price, and probably a lot quicker. Te carrier can retain fine control over the


services delivered using policy control in the SDN application. Bennett explained: ‘If this customer is asking for, say, gigabit levels of bandwidth, that’s fine, the portal will tell them it’s available or not. If they’re asking for tens of gigabits of bandwidth, at that point the phone rings on the travel agent’s desk again and they can step in.’ It’s important to take a pragmatic approach


when rolling out new services, he says. ‘Te whole point of this gradual evolution of rolling out a service like this is to find out if there’s value for the customer. If you find out that 90 per cent of the transactions are sub-one gigabit per second and can therefore can be fulfilled with a self-service portal, you can save yourself a fortune. But if you hold out and say you want to deal with 100 per cent of transactions in a self-service portal, you may never get there.’ Using the self-service bandwidth portal can


cut service provisioning times down to minutes instead of weeks or even months and is integrated with the billing system. From Pacnet’s point of view, the automation of key processes helps them to offer a more competitive service, generate new revenues, tap into underutilised resources on the network,


and increase customer retention all while lowering operational costs. Tere’s an important caveat, however. ‘One


of the provisos has to be that you have to have spare bandwidth in the network. If there isn’t any spare capacity on the route, the service provider would have to call up and order some equipment, then obviously at that point it becomes more like two weeks,’ he said.


Just another control plane Pacnet has deployed the Infinera OTS into its existing DTN-X production network by running in Hybrid Control mode, which allows new services to set up new bandwidth connections under SDN control, while existing production services continue to operate using their Infinera Digital Network Administrator (DNA) network management system. ‘One of the things I like to point out to


people is that SDN is just another control plane. Tere’s nothing magical about it,’ said Bennett. Ever since Infinera started shipping product in 2005, the company has used Generalised Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) as a control plane and touted what it calls ‘Instant Bandwidth’, the ability of the soſtware to set up and tear down connections in minutes. However, Bennett notes that GMPLS doesn’t


have exposed application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow third-parties to communicate with the soſtware, so if a service provider wants to do things with GMPLS,


Issue 7 • Spring 2015 FIBRE SYSTEMS 25


Pacnet and Infinera


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