A small service provider in Italy that owns a lot of fiber in its region decided its network would be ideal to sell cloud services. So AscoTLC deployed software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) from Nokia's Nuage Networks to deliver and manage those services.

AscoTLC’s network consists of about 1,300 miles of fiber optic cables and four regional data centers. It’s underlay network is based largely on Juniper Networks gear. AscoTLC employs about 55 people and serves more than 4,000 customers. It plans to connect 100 branch offices with SD-WAN this year, with a goal to reach 1,000 customer sites within three years, said Luigi Annunziata, who's with Nuage’s technical business development group for EMEA.

The centralized SDN and SD-WAN controller will be installed in AscoTLC’s data center in Santa Lucia, Italy. The single policy-based automation system will control networking services across the service provider’s OpenStack-enabled cloud. In the past, many AscoTLC services were VMware-based. But with Nuage, the company is extending its set of services to OpenStack without disruption.

For the SD-WAN service, AscoTLC customers can choose customer premises equipment (CPE), from the Nuage portfolio of 7850 Network Service Gateway (NSG) appliances, or they can use a virtual platform on x86 hardware. Nuage partner Fortinet will deliver security services as part of the SD-WAN.

Nuage stresses that its system is independent from any network infrastructure and topology, any virtualization environment, and any cloud orchestrator, and that it supports an open CPE platform, including the ability to integrate third party virtual network functions (VNFs). Moreover, the architecture uses the same SDN controller for both data center and WAN sites.

AscoTLC’s deployment of Nuage’s platform shares similarities with deployments of Nuage SD-WAN by Telefonica and BT.