NEC Contributes Network Virtualization to OpenDaylight 

NEC announced that its Virtual Tenant Network (VTN)  contribution to the OpenDaylight Project is featured in the organization’s first release, called “Hydrogen,” which was revealed at the first annual OpenDaylight Summit. The OpenDaylight Project is a community-led and industry-supported open source framework to advance Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and NEC is a founding gold member of the project.

The VTN, introduced by NEC at the July 2013 HackFest, consists of a set of technology components that provide a multi-tenant virtual network through the OpenDaylight controller. Su-Hun Yun, senior manager with NEC Corporation of America, will be presenting a live demo of VTN using multiple OpenDaylight controllers with OpenStack integration during the OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, CA. Yun’s summit session is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 4, from 1:30-3:20 p.m. PST.

“The VTN is a core technology of NEC’s ProgrammbleFlow Network Fabric, and has been deployed globally by carrier and enterprise customers for their production networks,” said Don Clark, director of business development for NEC Corporation of America. “The VTN network design enables deployment of logical networks on top of any underlying physical network topology, reducing complexity of traditional network design and increasing service agility. We’re pleased to be part of the Hydrogen release.”

Traditionally, physical networks have been configured as silos for each department within an organization or for each customer of a service provider. The result is huge, unneeded hardware investments and increased operating expenses because of underutilized, redundant network equipment.

The VTN addresses this issue by providing an abstraction that enables the complete separation of the network’s logical plane from its physical plane. In other words, it “hides” the complexity of the physical network and enables users to design and deploy any desired network for their customers, regardless of physical network or underlying operational characteristics. With the VTN, organizations can develop applications to program the network using Northbound APIs. Once the network has been defined using VTN, it will automatically be mapped to the physical network through the controller.

In addition to the advantage of hidden complexity mentioned above, benefits of the VTN include:

• More efficient management of the network resources
• Reduced time to configure network services
• Minimized network configuration errors