SDN Innovation of the Year: Cyan Blue Planet SDN Platform |
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Cyan had a number of key milestones in 2013. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May, demonstrated multi-vendor enterprise to data center service orchestration across the WAN at Interop Tokyo, and demonstrated multi-vendor NFV orchestration at the SDN World Congress in Germany.
The company also announced significant new customer wins, including being selected by Colt for its next-generation modular multi-service platform. This large-scale deployment included both Cyan's Z-Series packet-optical systems along with the Blue Planet SDN platform to automate, operate, provision and deliver Ethernet services across Colt's footprint.
Cyan established its Blue Orbit Ecosystem to test and deliver real-world multi-vendor SDN and NFV orchestration solutions, said president Michael Hatfield. The interoperable partners in this ecosystem include Arista, Accedian, Boundary, Canonical, Connectem, Embrane, Mellanox, Metaswitch, Omnitron, Overture, Pica8, RAD, Red Hat and RYU.
Hatfield said it's common knowledge that the carrier business model is under pressure. "Applications, cloud providers and mobile services drive massive growth and revenue on the back of the carrier network and infrastructure, yet carriers are left with the constant pressure of massively growing and scaling their infrastructure to keep pace."
This infrastructure, he said, is built on complex, and vertically integrated hardware and software platforms that are difficult for the service provider to operate and offer limited service elasticity. "Cyan's open, multi-vendor SDN platform, Blue Planet, was custom-designed to support service providers' efforts in separating software control from hardware to make networks simpler to operate and manage, which can lead to a better customer experience."
Blue Planet, its SDN and NFV orchestration platform, has been deployed in more than 100 accounts since its launch in December 2012. "Blue Planet makes it easier to deploy new services that connect the WAN, the data center and virtualized functions together using a single system that orchestrates services and makes better use of high-performance, but lower-cost hardware," he said.
Hatfield noted that many companies have built successful business models deploying virtualized applications, compute, storage and cloud services on the back of carrier networks and infrastructure.
"Ultimately, SDN and NFV will help service providers connect their massive investment in wide area networks with data center assets and virtualized applications. New, elastic network services and cloud-based applications will emerge from these service providers that will improve their profitability and make for a more 'sticky' and powerful end-customer experience."
Why they won
This carrier-grade SDN and NFV platform was built specifically for network operators, and lowers costs, simplifies operations and centralizes control and management of multi-layer, multi-vendor, multi-domain networks.