Ciena unveils a carrier-grade CPE for NFV
Since Ciena announced our NFV solution, Agility Matrix, in December, we have been quite busy working a variety of enhancements to the ecosystem. Today we take another step in that ecosystem with the unveiling and general availability of Ciena’s 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, our Ethernet CPE platform with VNF integration.
Ciena’s Agility Matrix enables managed service providers to quickly create and offer managed services to their enterprise customers. These services can be hosted on customer premise equipment via standard 3rd party COTS hardware or now on Ciena hardware with the 3938vi.
Priya Natarajan is Senior Director of Marketing for Ciena Agility, and an expert on the topics of SDN, NFV, cloud and security. You can find her on Twitter at @NatarajanPriya.
Since Ciena announced our NFV solution, Agility Matrix, in December, we have been quite busy working a variety of enhancements to the ecosystem. Today we take another step in that ecosystem with the unveiling and general availability of Ciena’s 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, our Ethernet CPE platform with VNF integration.
Ciena’s Agility Matrix enables managed service providers to quickly create and offer managed services to their enterprise customers. These services can be hosted on customer premise equipment via standard 3rd party COTS hardware or now on Ciena hardware with the 3938vi.
The 3938vi is a carrier-grade compact CPE platform that delivers 10GbE service capability. It is based on Ciena’s Service-Aware Operating System (SAOS) used in all of Ciena’s packet switches, providing operational efficiency and consistent system attributes. The 3938vi enables service providers to have a one stop shop for all their needs from VNFs to hardware. This further accelerates time-to-market for new managed services offerings, and also allows for the flexibility to deploy new types of services as customer needs evolve.
So how does Ciena’s 3938vi fit into the overall NFV experience? VNFs can be purchased from Ciena’s cloud based VNF market. Agility Director, which generates on-the-fly licenses for the VNFs and manages their end-to-end lifecycle on the host, then deploys these VNFs on either a standard x86 based COTS hardware or Ciena’s 3938vi. This provides operators the opportunity to roll out services at the edge of the network and at customer premises.
One of the key advantages of virtualization is the ability to scale to meet demand. While the VNFs can scale, it is imperative to have underlying hardware that is flexible and can meet carrier-grade requirements. The 3938vi is built for carrier-grade deployments. It provides optimal performance for the VNFs and can scale to meet the growing and dynamic demands of the operator environment.
The 3938vi platform supports interworking between transport options via a sophisticated and scalable virtual switching architecture, leading to complete service flexibility and optimal utilization of network resources. With an extensive set of MPLS features, the solution also supports resilient L2VPNs and enables service providers to offer connection-oriented MPLS-TP-based services on metro networks, extending the functionality and scalability of existing MPLS networks to accommodate the behavior and operational practices of traditional transport networks.
These capabilities enable greater revenue generation by utilizing available network resources efficiently, while improving customer relations with enforceable and reliable SLAs. Now customers can gain all the benefits of virtualization while using a reliable and flexible CPE hardware.
Learn more about Ciena’s Agility Matrix NFV solution on ciena.com or download our new 3938vi data sheet.