Cyan and Accedian have won a Japanese SDN buildout, as the companies announced today that they're at the heart of a next-generation Ethernet service being launched by service provider KVH.

The etherXEN service is coming online this month but will add software-defined networking (SDN) trappings in August. Specifically, KVH is using two of the SDN applications that vendors have been touting for a long time, namely, on-demand provisioning and dynamic bandwidth allocation.

The latter will be the source of a burstable Ethernet service, where customers will be able to tap extra bandwidth sporadically to handle unexpected traffic surges.

“They made a strategic decision to transform their network, applied SDN, and are deriving the benefits from it now,” says Abel Tong, director of solutions marketing at Cyan. “Now that they have the new architecture in place, they pulled this service together very quickly.”

The deal gives Cyan and Accedian another carrier use case to show off alongside Colt, which has been their marquee customer so far. Cyan, in particular, has been pushing to become better known in SDN circles for its Blue Planet orchestration software, which handles packet and optical transport networks together.

KVH, which calls itself “Asia’s information delivery platform,” says the cloud-centric etherXEN launching in four Japanese cities this month will provide guaranteed bandwidth services that can be changed from 1 Mb/s to 100 Gb/s without different equipment or interfaces.

More generally, the company says it now can deliver service and upgrades in 10 days compared to the industry standard of six weeks, and customers can save up to 30 percent compared with fixed bandwidth services from other major carriers. The offering also includes a comprehensive private networking service integrated with Amazon Web Services so “people can have a more elastic network to go along with elastic resources,” says Cyan CMO Joe Cumello.

Based mostly on KVH’s existing optical fiber network, etherXen runs on Cyan’s Z-Series metro packet-optical platform and Accedian’s MetroNODE LT/GT network interface device (NID) at the customer location. Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform sits across the top to automate and orchestrate software.

"What they really wanted to do with this network is to deploy the latest technology and choose at every point in network what they consider the best-in-class equipment, which is not always from one vendor," Tong says.

Service coverage for etherXEN will include all areas in Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, and Osaka as well as other locations through other major Japanese carriers.

(Photo source: Wikimedia.)