Published on the 04/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The new technology of software defined networking is already providing real benefits to organisations, with two networking companies – Pacnet and Megaport – employing the technology to enable organisations to ‘dial up’ high capacity links between data centres by the hour, the day or longer…
Normally such connections take weeks to acquire from telcos and they require minimum commitments of six months or longer.
The software that controls the key components of networks – switches and routers – is generally embedded in the devices and making changes to their configurations requires manual intervention via proprietary interfaces. With software-defined networking the control functions are removed into external software that controls the switches and routers through standard interfaces.
Megaport is an Australian start-up company launched in mid-2013. It has put its technology in 18 data centres around Australia and either installed or leased optic fibres between these. It plans to expand its network to over 30 major data centres and into Singapore and Hong Kong later this year.
Customers can acquire bandwidth via a web portal and the company has just released Android and iOS apps that bring this functionality to smartphones and tablets. According to founder and CEO Bevan Slattery, a company with a connection to any Megaport data centre will be able to connect to any other Megaport customer connected to any other data centre. For metro area links Megaport is charging a flat fee of $200 per month or $20 per day, regardless of bandwidth.
Pacnet operates over 20 data centres around Asia Pacific, interconnected by its own network of submarine optical cables. It launched its Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN) in beta between a limited number of its data centres last November and announced full availability in late February between its own and other data centres in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. The company says it will continue to expand the network throughout the rest of the year, initially to Korea and Taiwan.
Pacnet says that customers can provision network services between two locations in minutes without going through the traditional, long lead, manual provisioning process. PEN also offers several classes of service, which enables customers to build network interconnects with bandwidth and performance characteristics tailored to their particular business requirements, for example video would require a higher grade of service than simply file transfer.
