On Monday, IP Infusion announced the launch of its new Universal SD-Edge solution, which uses AT&T's DANOS network operating system (OS.) IP Infusion's disaggregated platform was designed to increase universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) deployments by using low-cost, off-the-shelf x86 devices. On the white box front, IP Infusion announced Silicom as its first partner.
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White box and uCPE deployments received a boost last year when AT&T put its DANOS network operating system, which it calls Vyatta, into the Linux Foundation's Networking Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project, and also named IP Infusion as the exclusive integrator and reseller of DANOS.
While there are other network operating systems in play today, the industry benefits from access to DANOS due to AT&T's expertise and deployments. AT&T has deployed Vyatta in multiple white box use cases across its fixed and mobile networks.
With uCPE and network function virtualization (NFV), IP Infusion said service providers could tap into the benefits of the cloud by replacing closed appliances with their choice of software that can be hosted anywhere in the network on their choice of open hardware.
IP Infusion said it was working with industry-leading ecosystem partners to provide best-in-class virtual network functions (VNFs). Universal SD-Edge, which is part of IP Infusion’s Open SD-Edge platform, gives enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) more flexibility to add new services while lowering operational costs.
Service providers have long complained that onboarding VNFs was too time consuming because vendors had their own flavors of them. On the other hand, vendors have said it's difficult for them to design VNFs for each specific operator.
Using its Universal SD-EDGE solution, IP Infusion said customers could onboard third-party VNFs such as firewalls, SD-WAN and WAN optimization. It can also deploy new on-demand services by integrating with service providers' management and network orchestration (MANO) systems.
It comes with built-in routing, security functions and a common abstraction layer with support for hardware offloads and software data plane to speed up the deployment of new service providers by operators.
For white box deployments, IP Infusion's competitors include DriveNets, Arrcus and Volta Networks.