Highlights: Fall 2012 Carrier Ethernet World Congress

Last week, while attended the Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Barcelona, I saw a great turnout of service providers and equipment manufacturers, as well as a lineup of interesting speakers representing the MEF. [note: this article originally appeared in Carrier Ethernet News]

The hot topics dominating the show were Software Defined Networks (SDN), virtualization and cloud computing.  Each day began with Michael Howard of Infonetics Research offering some of his thoughts on the state of the Ethernet world.

One of his initial observations was that he is seeing movement from an OSI seven layer model to a simpler model consisting of just three layers:

1. network transport
2. network and cloud services
3. end-to-end services

Another interesting insight, according to a poll of service providers, was a consensus that the top 3 drivers for carrier adoption of SDN are:

1. Simplified provisioning
2. Creation of network services
3. Virtual networks

On the opening morning of the show, Peter Konings of Verizon during his keynote address noted that there is conflict between ease of using the Internet for cloud access and reluctance of businesses to transport mission-critical services over Internet. He went on to explain how this creates an opportunity for carriers to provide improved cloud interconnect and delivery with flexibility, reliability and security.

All in all, it was a great venue for sharing thoughts and ideas with other industry insiders. I captured a number of interesting nuggets from many of the speakers, including:

• Axel Clauberg of Deutsche Telekom described future TeraStream arch, where the core is built on IP and WDM - No MPLS or OTN in core.
• Jason Kleeh of Brocade regarding SDN/OpenFlow programmability & apps – “The best app is the one that we haven't thought of yet.”
• Amit Agarwal of Google – “An SDN approach provides a unified view and allows Google's WAN to run at 95% capacity with faster convergence”.
• Nicolas Fischbach of Colt – “SDN is not a protocol – It’s about thinking differently about network architectures. Focus on the use cases.”
• Marcin Kotlarski of GTS – “An end-to-end SLA can best be provided when Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Broker and Cloud Carrier are one.”
• Steve West of CYAN - Leverage the cloud to deliver the cloud
• Kevin Duffy of Fastback – We have to use technology to contain chaos
• Dr. Antony Thorley of Ofcom - TDM based services represent 60% of BT’s regulated leased line income but only 10% of the bandwidthcompared to Ethernet.
• Naoto Yoshimoto of NTT – Future goal for mobile networks at NTT is to provide 1G service per user

For Overture, things ended on a high note, with IIR presenting their Carrier Ethernet Awards EMEA 2012 at an evening reception after the show.  I am pleased to say that the Overture 1400 Carrier Ethernet platform received the award for Best Carrier Ethernet Demarcation Product at the CEWC EMEA awards.  I was fortunate to be able to attend and gratified to have accepted the award on behalf of the entire Overture team. (Sanjeev Mervana of Cisco presents Overture CTO Prayson Pate with the award for Best Carrier Ethernet Demarcation Product)