Windstream (News - Alert) Wholesale recently launched SDNow Waves for Data Center Cloud applications, which provides customers with on-demand optical wavelength services via automated, SDN-based provisioning. The announcement follows the company’s work last year with Ciena Blue Planet.
Target (News - Alert) customers for this offering are organizations requiring high speed transport between major data centers. That includes organizations in the digital media, banking, and similar verticals.
“These are customers whose bandwidth needs are growing quickly, and need a reliable provider such as Windstream that can quickly turn up wave service via SDN provisioning,” said Jeff Brown, who is the director of product management and marketing for Windstream Wholesale.
The company’s Ciena Blue Planet announcement last year was Windstream’s first foray into multi-vendor service orchestration, Brown said. That was prototype work, he added, not on the commercial network.
“The SDNow announcement introduces an umbrella group of products that Windstream Wholesale will be launching leveraging SDN,” said Brown. “The initial product, available now, is the SDN Wave[s] product, which offers 1G and 10G service via SDN provisioning.”
This reflects the fact that Windstream has operationalized SDN-based Layer 1 optical service between data centers, he added. The company is initially delivering SDNow Waves through data centers in Atlanta, Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami. Windstream Wholesale plans to make the service available through 50 additional sites starting this summer.
“Leveraging open orchestration capabilities, Windstream utilizes its optical network as a programmable resource to accelerate the delivery of optical wavelength services,” the company explained. “Windstream’s agile, DevOps-style approach to automation development enables the company to abstract the complexity of service delivery and offers a simplified view of the multi-vendor optical layer.”
The company plans to introduce additional products in this area. Those will be made available as Windstream integrates additional third-party controllers from equipment partners into the MDSO environment, he explained.