Tata Communications delivers over 25 percent of the world’s internet routes. And Tata Communications’ subsidiary Tata Communications Transformation Services (TCTS) has created a Virtual Cloud Exchange (VCX) to help Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers connect to public clouds.

Vineet Anshuman, head of global client partner transformation services with TCTS, said the platform was created to help Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers connect with major public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google. He said the Tier 1s “had the right skill set” to connect to public cloud providers, and that process has gone relatively easily. “Tier 2 and Tier 3 is a different ballgame,” said Anshuman. “They don’t have a lot of the right investments. They were struggling to create this connectivity. They asked Tata. We understand the telco market very well.”

VCX consists of a lifecycle service orchestration (LSO) engine, an SDN controller, and network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI).

The cloud exchange uses commodity, general-purpose compute. VNFs are instantiated by the LSO that allows a given tenant to self-provision via a portal to connect to a given cloud provider.

The distribution and granularity of application workloads is driving the need for seamless connectivity between various infrastructure topologies. TCTS' cloud exchange routing VNF enables service providers to extend their managed network services to include cloud connectivity with Network Address Translation (NAT) from private to public address namespaces.

The automation in the platform is driven by the lifecycle service orchestrator. The LSO can instantiate a set of VNFs for the given tenant automatically on an already established NFVI that is shared between all service provider subscribers. The VCX platform is built for hyperscale environments with leaf spine fabric and data plane development kit (DPDK) for data plane optimization. Additional VNFs can be inserted on behalf of the tenant for various functions including monitoring, security, and WAN acceleration.

In addition to helping Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators, the VCX platform is also available for exchange providers and “anyone who has not created orchestration around their SDN platform,” said Anshuman.