CenturyLink is preparing to launch NFV-enhanced services to enterprise and small and midsized business (SMB) customers based on Cyan’s Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator.
Specifically, CenturyLink will use Cyan’s Blue Planet orchestration for their Programmable Services Backbone (PSB), its platform that for next-generation virtualized services to its customers. Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator bridges multiple technologies to instantiate virtual network functions (VNF) from multiple vendors. Blue Planet will add these virtual network functions to CenturyLink’s network for quickly providing software-enabled services and ubiquitous service coverage to CenturyLink’s broad set of customers.
Cyan said its Blue Planet software can instantiate and control virtual functions, coordinate with physical and virtual network resources, and interconnect virtual functions (i.e., vFirewall, vDPI, vEncryption, vRouter, vDNS, etc.) to achieve service chaining. The programmability of the Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator allows carriers like CenturyLink to onboard and define new services through a flexible template-based architecture. The open architecture of Blue Planet’s NFV Orchestrator enables rich, multi-vendor environments within the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), including support for different cloud management software and physical servers.
“CenturyLink has taken a leadership position in driving the changes required to build a more service- centric network that derives maximum value from network assets while addressing evolving customer requirements,” said Aamir Hussain, CTO, CenturyLink. “The Programmable Services Backbone delivers an open, software-enabled architecture based on Cyan’s NFV orchestration technology that will allow us to rapidly deploy new services to enterprise and SMB customers across our footprint.”
“CenturyLink is leading the network transformation movement that is so critical to the future of our industry,” said Mike Hatfield, president, Cyan. “We’re proud that Cyan’s Blue Planet is playing a critical role in how they deploy multi-vendor VNFs as services to end customers. Together, CenturyLink and Cyan are unifying the data center, virtual resources, WAN, and managed services to create a new way of doing business for network operators.”
- In June 2014, CenturyLink sponsored an ETSI NFV ISG-approved proof of concept (PoC) solution based on RAD’s dedicated customer-edge D-NFV equipment running Fortinet’s Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Certes Networks’ virtual encryption/decryption engine as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) with Cyan’s Blue Planet system orchestrating the entire ecosystem. The companies said their D-NFV allows the placement of VNFs where they will be both most effective and least expensive, including at the customer edge. Cyan’s Blue Planet can orchestrate both NFV and multi-vendor Ethernet services.
VNFs at the customer edge were implemented with RAD’s ETX-2, a D-NFV empowered NID, the cornerstone of RAD’s Service Assured Access solution. RAD’s solution integrates an x86 server platform to host value-added service capabilities, as well as network functionalities that run on virtual machines. Fortinet and Certes Networks provided VNFs that were instantiated on RAD’s ETX-2 by Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform. Fortinet’s FortiGate-VM enforces next-generation firewall security functions that provide network and application layer protection. Real-time security updates are pushed to the FortiGate-VM by FortiGuard subscription services to ensure it is aware of and enforcing protection from the latest security threats. The virtual Certes Enforcement Point (vCEP) is a virtual encryption solution that secures data in motion over any public or private network. vCEPs can be dynamically provisioned to create Certes’ CryptoFlow VPNs, fully meshed multi-point VPNs safeguarding data in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. CryptoFlows protect critical data for any application with automatically enforced policies and simplified control of encryption keys.
