Sedona Systems officially announced its NetFusion Hierarchical Network Controller. The product isn’t exactly new in that Sedona has been talking about it for a while. In late 2017, Sedona CTO Ori Gerstel said it would be “a controller over others’ controllers.”
Sedona’s NetFusion technology includes two parts. The first part has been used by service providers to map the IP and optical layers of their networks. The company’s software maps the IP aggregation network, the IP core network, the metro optical network, and the long-haul optical network.
Now, Sedona is announcing the second part of its technology ‑ the NetFusion Hierarchical Controller. The controller will use the data from its mapping technology along with software-defined networking (SDN) control to provision and optimize Layer 0-3 services.
And while other vendors build controllers for both the optical and IP layers of networks, “We will sit on top of these SDN controllers and put the entire network together,” said Gerstel last fall.
Sedona says this is important because real-world service provider networks consist of equipment and software systems operating at many layers and from multiple vendors. The controller is “hierarchical” because it exists at the top level of the network control layer above domain controllers from packet and transport vendors.
Daniel Tardent, VP of marketing at Sedona, said of the controller, “We’re going through pre-deployment verification testing with service providers. In a service provider’s environment, every deployment we do is somewhat different. There’s always going to be some customization that’s involved.”
Verizon has been using Sedona’s NetFusion technology across its core network, according to a video in which Gerstel talks to Glenn Wellbrock, Verizon’s director of optical transport planning. Wellbrock didn’t go into specific as to exactly how Verizon is using NetFusion.
“Verizon had specific use cases they deployed us for to begin with,” said Tardent. “Once the platform is in for specific use cases, it can evolve to support the hierarchical functionality.”
Asked how many different IP and optical controllers NetFusion would know how to manage, Tardent said, “Because we’re a software vendor and we don’t play in the equipment space, our relationships with equipment vendors and other controller vendors are good. Part of the work we do in legacy environments is we build adapters to communicate with all manner of optical and IP equipment and element management systems. As we move into SDN, we’re communicating with SDN controllers from different vendors.”
