Deploying SDN in GEANT production network

Abstract

Since the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures and services grows, it becomes challenging for Service Providers like GEANT to manage the proprietary underlay, while keeping costs low. In such a scenario, Software Defined Networking (SDN), open hardware and open source software prove to be key components to address those challenges. After one year of development, SDX-L2 and BoD, the SDN-ization of the GEANT Open and Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) services, have been brought to the pilot status and GEANT is now testing the outcomes on its operational network. In this demonstration, we show BoD and SDX-L2 “going live” at the GEANT production infrastructure. The pilots run on the same underlay infrastructure thanks to the virtualization capabilities of the network devices. Provisioning of the services is covered during the demo. In the final steps of the demonstration, we show how the infrastructure is able to automatically manage network events and how it remains operational in the case of fault events.