Pacnet deploys SDN to deliver international bandwidth on demand

Pacnet has unveiled its version of what will undoubtedly be the network of the future: international bandwidth between data centres that can be called up on demand for an hour, a week or year either via a web portal or, via application program interfaces, by an application which needs access to that bandwidth.

The facility embodies the key elements of a software-defined network: commodity switches and routers that are configured and commanded via software using the OpenFlow open source protocol. It marks huge leap forward from the current situation where international capacity takes days or weeks to implement and where commitments are made in months or years rather than hours or days.

The service, the Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN), goes live this week with a limited number of beta customers and will be available as a commercial service from early next year between 10 data centres around Asia Pacific, including ones in Sydney and Melbourne. It will be available to Pacnet customers with equipment in these data centres.

Pacnet is uniquely positioned to offer a service of this type because it owns an extensive international cable network that serves its data centres - it was originally purely a cable network player but some years ago embarked on a strategy of building data centres close to the landing points of its submarine cable network.

Jim Fagan, president of managed services at Pacnet, said: “We have made a lot of progress on building out our data centre infrastructure and we have been working hard to upgrade and enhance our network.

“We looked at how we could bring these assets together. We had a vision that we could create a virtual Asia-Pacific data centre for customers and that led us to the Pacnet Enabled Network. It is not so much a product as a platform.”

PEN offers layer 2 ethernet connectivity point-to-point with a choice of QoS levels “Customers will be able to provision bandwidth by the hour and just pay for that hour and for renewal options they will be able to choose auto disconnect or to renew for the same terms or a pay-as-you-go rate,” Fagan said. “The customer will have complete control to go in and change that at any time. We will have three different performance characteristics: low-latency, standard and best effort.”

He added: “PEN is going to allow them to make intelligent networking decisions in the same way as they try to get the most out of their computer resources and applications and their software.”

Nigel Stitt, CEO of Pacnet Australia and New Zealand, added: “This is aligning the network with the attributes that everybody is adopting around cloud: on demand scalability using resources more cost effectively aligned with the business.”

There will be no upfront costs to make use of the service. Fagan said that, because Pacnet was able to use low-cost commodity hardware it was able to provision the connectivity in its data centres to enable customers to make use of PEN when they are ready to do so.

At launch of the beta the service will be available from Pacnet’s own data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, and from Global Switch in Sydney along with data centres in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.

“The plan is to launch a controlled beta next week with a limited number of customers,” Fagan said. “We will not be charging for it but we need feedback from the customers.”

The service will be expanded to other locations in 2014. “We want to get China online as soon as possible and we want the US online next year,” Fagan said. “We will also be looking at future functionality. Right now it’s point-to-point but we want to make it fully meshed over the course of next year.”

He also envisages the service being white labelled by cloud service providers to enable on-demand connectivity to their facilities. From launch customers will be able to ‘dial up’ capacity into Amazon Web Services. “We will be an Amazon Direct Connect partner so this will allow customers to connect to Amazon, and we are talking to others,” Fagan said.

He added “There will come a point where some of the carriers that are buying capacity from us would like to have a tool like this to pass on to their own customers and we would be happy to provide that.”

By making extensive use of open source software, Fagan said Pacnet had been able to develop and deploy PEN in a fairly short time frame. “We have been thinking about this conceptually for about a year and around [northern hemisphere] springtime was when we really started putting the technology building blocks together.

“We’re using as much open source software as we can. We have a couple of companies in the US we have been working with. Mirantis is a software engineering company that is very heavily involved in building private clouds using open source technology and they have developed a lot of tools for hooking all this together. For the networking piece we used a company in the US called Vello.” He declined to say how much Pacnet had invested in the project.