By dumping proprietary equipment and standardizing networks with the use of SDN and NFV, Level 3 expects to enable even more virtualization in 2017.
Chris McReynolds, vice president of cloud and data services for Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT), spoke about some of the challenges with migrating from proprietary equipment to policy-driven networks using SDN and NFV in a Q&A with Telco Transformation. (See Level 3's McReynolds Discusses Turning Up Virtualization With SDN & NFV.)
"With SDN controls, we have automated thousands of tasks, significantly increasing operational scale, shortening lead times, standardizing configurations and improving customer experience," McReynolds said. "Level 3’s SDN orchestration and control system includes more than 75,000 network elements."
As part of its SDN/NFV transformation, Level 3 is leveraging white box servers to implement services faster and with more scalability. In October, it had more than 20,000 white boxes running on its global network.
"Progress in NFV, functions like routers, firewalls or WAN acceleration, are expected to gain momentum in 2017 as a single piece of equipment, a virtualized server, can manage multiple services such as routing, firewalls and WAN Acceleration," he said. "In the past, the diversity of vendors made the task of inventorying and distributed deployment daunting. For a global network like ours, we need partners who take charge for specific geographies."
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation