Chinese telecommunications company Huawei successfully demonstrated its Open Network Hypervisor (OpenNH) solution at California's Open Networking Summit 2015, held June 15-18. The solution is an independent tenant virtual network based on software-defined networking (SDN).
According to Huawei, the solution "supports operators with accelerating service deployment, providing innovative open networks and enhancing secure separation between tenants, and reducing operation costs." It is aimed at network and virtual operators and data centers. OpenNH separates the physical and virtual networks, creating a "network visualization layer" that allows for tenant isolation and increased operational speeds and efficiency, as well as traffic scheduling and customization for wireless customers' quality of service needs.
The company's demonstration successfully ran two virtual networks simultaneously, each running individual SDN controllers (the Open Network Operating System and OpenDaylight). Additionally, the demo provided a look at a 5G network slicing use case.
Burgeoning interest in SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions continues as these services offer the opportunity to better control networks and tailor them to consumer and tenant demands. The software-reliant solutions also make obsolete hardware that is often expensive to produce and time-consuming to operate, update and install. Many wireless providers, most vocally AT&T (NYSE: T), are looking at SDN and NFV solutions as a way to lower costs and launch new services faster.
Huawei announced a partnership with the Open Networking Foundation, sponsor of the ONS summit, and ONOS, one of its demonstration platforms, earlier in the year to promote the acceleration of SDN adoption. The Chinese telecom giant has been one of the forerunners in SDN and NFV adoption, building open labs and partnering with other telecom providers globally to push for commercialization of the software solutions.
In addition to showing off its SDN chops, Huawei ran a series of other demonstrations throughout the summit, including an intent-based interface, ICT gateway security, a variety of ONOS-based bandwidth solutions and more.
For more:
- see Huawei's release
- see this Telecompaper article
Special Report: Why AT&T, Verizon, Ericsson and the rest of the industry is embracing SDN and NFV
Related articles:
Open Networking Foundation releases Atrium to advance open source SDN
Huawei collaborates with ONOS, ONF on open SDN ecosystem