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Avaya joins SDN club with ONA-nism

Casts code upon fertile ground with support for Open: Daylight/vSwitch/Stack

Avaya is the latest of the big names to drink the software-defined networks (SDN) Kool-Aid, launching its Open SDN Fx architecture on a waiting world.

Along the way, the company is giving various open projects a kick along. Its SDN Fx Fabric Orchestrator Ethernet controller appliance offers northbound and southbound interfaces, with OpenFlow support.

At the core of the strategy is the Open Networking Adapter (ONA), which takes any Ethernet port and connects it into the fabric. This ONA-nism, Avaya hopes, will cast the seed of SDN upon more than just office devices – the company cites medical devices and manufacturing machinery as example.

It also has OpenDaylight support (for the SDN controller) and OpenStack support (for cloud management).

The Open vSwitch-based ONA is designed to “automatically provision a QoS-customised virtual path” across the network.

Currently there are two versions, the ONA 1101GT, which provides one WAN interface and one device port (10/100/1000 Base T), and the eight-LAN, two-WAN port ONA 1208GT.

The company says the ONA's Open vSwitch capabilities make endpoints like branch offices – often “network illiterate” and hard to centrally manage and monitored – can be better integrated into the enterprise network.

The Fabric Extend feature supports Fabric Connect connections between multiple data centres, campuses and branches. Fabric Extend is implemented as logical IS-IS interfaces which create “virtual tunnels between fabric nodes” using IP routing or MPLS networks. The traffic is encapsulated in the VXLAN format. ®

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