While Verizon has made some noise about building a telco cloud and creating a software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) reference architecture, some of that is futuristic. But today, two vendors — Radisys and Mojatatu — announced their SDN and NFV technologies are being used in live deployments in Verizon’s wireless and wired networks.

Radisys’ FlowEngine platform is handling traffic distribution, and Mojatatu is providing its SDN controller.

According to a Verizon spokesperson, the telco cloud and NFV reference architecture in earlier news reports relate to “network” applications, but today’s news about the Radisys/Mojatatu technology is for “product” applications.

While the platform for network applications uses OpenStack as the orchestration layer and Big Switch Networks for the network operating system, the product platform in today’s news uses Apache Mesos as the orchestration layer and standard Linux/Cumulus Linux as the networking OS layer, says the Verizon spokesperson. It’s part of Verizon’s programmable edge router network transformation project.

Verizon is using Mojatatu’s MojaNet SDN controller in production. Mojatatu CEO Jamal Hadi Salim, says, “We’re running a real network here. The requirements for robustness are five-nines. You can’t take the cellphone network down.”

Radisys’ FlowEngine is interoperable with the MojaNet SDN controller. FlowEngine is based on Radisys’ TDE-500 platform and FlowEngine software, providing a combination of switching, load balancing, and routing technologies for SDN environments. FlowEngine’s programmable switch can be controlled by third-party controllers, and in this case it’s controlled by MojaNet via the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF)’s Forces interface.

“In the case of SDN, most providers tend toward ONF [Open Networking Foundation] OpenFlow,” says Grant Henderson, Radisys’ VP of corporate marketing. “Verizon approached us. They liked FlowEngine, but they wanted us to support the Forces interface.”

Verizon deployed the FlowEngine and MojaNet technology to accelerate the introduction of new services that have large and small traffic flows, including cloud-based applications, video optimization, and IoT.