Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday took the wraps off its Network Services Platform (NSP), a software-defined networking (SDN) solution designed to dramatically reduce the time taken for telcos to launch new services by bringing together service automation and network control.
According to the Franco-U.S. kit maker, in today’s environment, developing and provisioning services, and engineering the network, is a long, drawn-out process. Alcatel-Lucent said its NSP bridges service design, provisioning and network engineering, which can enable operators to define and deploy new services in real time.
"We have created a simple interface that can deal with the complexity of network control across multiple technologies. We built it from the ground up to enable a true carrier SDN that allows our customers to thrive in today’s cloud-driven world," said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP routing and transport business, in a statement.
Alcatel-Lucent said its NSP can provision IP, Ethernet, and optical services across all network layers over any vendor’s equipment, and in hardware-based, virtualised, or hybrid network architectures.
"In order for SDN to mean we can really improve our customer experience and impact our network economics, we need approaches that consider the real-time state of the network and relate it to the requirements of the service we provide," explained Rob Shakir, end-to-end network architect at BT.
"Doing so allows us to assure performance, and optimise resource usage across all our network layers,& quot; he said. "Tightly coupling service requirements and performance with network control, as in ALU’s (Alcatel-Lucent’s) NSP, promises to deliver real-world benefits of centralised optimisation whilst exploiting the strength of our existing distributed network."
Alcatel-Lucent said its NSP will be commercially available from June.
