Epsilon and China's DCConnect have teamed up on two-way, intercarrier network orchestration across each other's networks.
While there have been other demonstrations of intercarrier SDN network orchestration, Epsilon and DCConnect plan to commercially deploy their integration in the third quarter of this year.
Two-way, SDN-based intercarrier orchestration would let service providers automate the provisioning of wholesale services across partner networks. With intercarrier orchestration, service providers would be able to reach across the globe to serve large enterprise customers, such as financial institutions, with on demand, dynamic network applications and services.
Earlier this year, Verizon and Colt demonstrated two-way intercarrier SDN network orchestration during an event in London. That demonstration used MEF's operational LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) APIs to make near real-time bandwidth changes in their live production networks.
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At MEF 17 last year, AT&T, Orange, Colt, Ciena. Amdocs, and Fujitsu showed a proof of concept demonstration using MEF's LSO Sonata software development kit (SDK) to provision Ethernet services across AT&T and Orange's SDN architectures.
At last year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, AT&T, Orange Business Services. and Colt announced they had formed an orchestration partnership that would allow them to provide Carrier Ethernet services across each other's SDN architectures using TM Forum and MEF LSO APIs.
While Epsilon and DCConnect said their respective SDN platforms were integrated via an API, there was no additional information on whether that API was from MEF or TM Forum.
Epsilon and DCConnect's partnership marked the first time that two SDN platforms were interconnected in China via a bi-lateral API Integration. DCConnect’s customers in China will gain access to Epsilon’s Global Interconnect Fabric when they use DCConnect’s SD-Cloud Express platform.
The integration also enables users to interconnect with Epsilon’s network of more than 600 service providers, cloud service providers and internet exchanges while also providing access to more than 100 points of presence (PoP) across Asia, Europe, Middle East and North America.
On the flip side, DCConnect will let Epsilon’s global customers and partners interconnect in major cities in China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Those customers can use the Infiny by Epsilon platform to connect to DCConnect’s SDN network with access to more than 90 data centers and 11 cloud providers—including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Enterprise Cloud—that are available through DCConnect’s network infrastructure.