Nokia recognised by GigaOm for its data centre fabric solution

Author: Isha Jain

Nokia has announced that GigaOm analysts have ranked the company as an innovation leader and outperformer for the second consecutive year for its data centre fabric solution, which enables data centres and cloud environments to easily scale, adapt and operate. It was recognised in a recent GigaOm Radar report on the data centre switching market in a review that included all notable industry vendors.

The company’s data centre networking portfolio includes the 7250 IXR product suite of modular platforms, designed for data centre spines and data centre wide area network connectivity deployments, and the 7220 IXR suite of fixed configuration platforms for leaf and spine deployments in data centres. These two series of hardware products feature multiple variants that support port speeds from 1GE up to 800GE.

Its data centre networking portfolio runs the Service Router Linux (SR Linux) Network Operating System (NOS). It is an open, modular, extensible and resilient NOS built on an unmodified Linux kernel. Its NetOps Development Kit (NDK) enables application developers to take advantage of the underlying model-driven architecture. With the NDK, data centre teams can develop new applications and operational tools in the language of their choice and have deep programmatic access to, and control over, the entire IXR switching system on which they are deployed.

The company ranks high on the NetOps suitability evaluation metric, having designed its fabric services system as an operational toolkit and management system to improve and scale operations across the entire operational lifecycle of the data centre fabric. The system enables highly automated design (day zero), deployment (day one) and operations (day two) processes. Day zero and one activities of the system include the fully automated design and deployment of a standard BGP-based IP fabric. 

For day two operations, the system automates EVPN workload deployments and maintenance activities. The system constantly monitors the fabric by leveraging telemetry, comparing its state with various intents, and analysing the results to find configuration inconsistencies, faults or other deviations that may lead to network issues, and providing recommended resolution paths to bring the fabric back to the intended state. It also features a ‘Digital Twin’ capability that can be used to validate any changes done to the data centre fabric before being deployed in production.

Andrew Green, Analyst, GigaOm, says, “Nokia’s IXR series switches deliver high-performance hardware with a fully programmable NOS built for NetOps from the ground up. Nokia ranks high on a variety of metrics, including automation and support for network design, deployment and operations.”

Rudy Hoebeke, Vice President of Product Management, IP Service Routing at Nokia, says, “Although Nokia is a relatively new entrant into the market, our data centre fabric solution leverages the company’s 20+ years of experience in IP routing and network operations, helping customers take charge of their data centre operations. GigaOm’s ranking validates the way we have approached the data centre switching market and reflects the rapid changes occurring in this space, which is opening opportunities for disruption and innovation.”