- Nokia landed a deal with Zayo to upgrade the latter’s IP network
- The crux of the overhaul lies in the ‘spine-leaf’ architecture
- Zayo’s move mirrors hyperscaler data center upgrades
Nokia’s $1 billion Nvidia deal understandably grabbed most of the headlines last week. What didn’t get as much fanfare was the vendor’s new contract with Zayo to overhaul the latter’s IP network.
Aaron Werley, Zayo’s SVP of Engineering, told Fierce Nokia’s tech will allow Zayo to not only expand its ability to deliver, 100G, 400G and 800G-capable services but also “[allow] us to get closer to our customers.”
“We had a previous architecture that didn’t allow the scale that we needed to be able to provide to our customers,” he said. The move comes after Zayo announced in July it beefed up capacity by completing 400G upgrades in its North American core network.
The plan, according to Werley is to use Nokia’s IP router solution to install “smaller form factor” routers, which Zayo is already deploying in its New York and New Jersey markets, closer to enterprise sites.
These devices are designed to aggregate traffic closer to the customer while reducing their exposure to fiber cuts, he said. They’re also a means of providing a more standardized – and more automated – solution across Zayo’s broader network.
“Our ability to automate the delivery of services will dramatically improve,” Werley said, adding Zayo can “easily integrate” Nokia’s technology with its existing tools and automation systems.
Choosing Nokia was a no-brainer, he said. The vendor already supplies Zayo for cell site backhaul along with long-haul optical connectivity. And Werley said Zayo has ramped its use of Nokia’s optical products after the vendor’s Infinera acquisition.
The ‘spine-leaf’ approach
The specific products Zayo is using are Nokia’s FP5-based 7750 Service Router and 7250 Interconnect Router. The 7750, built on Nokia’s FP5 silicon network processor, does a lot of “heavy lifting” in helping operators roll out more end-user devices, said Jeff Valley, Nokia’s VP of IP Networks for CSPs.
The key behind the technology, he told Fierce, is that it uses a spine-leaf architecture, a term you’ve probably heard in reference to data center networking.
A spine-leaf network consists of spine nodes or switches that are connected with leaf switches, which then connect to end-user devices. Think of actual leaves that grow on a tree branch.
“The customer ports will plug into the leaves. And you can add leaves and just connect them to the spines kind of as you wish,” Valley explained, which in turns results in fewer network disruptions as the architecture creates multiple parallel paths for data to travel.
For Zayo’s part, it saw how hyperscalers used spine leaf to deploy data center routing and switching at scale and decided to follow suit, Werley said.
It’s part of a wider path telcos are pursing to make their networks more consumable and cloud-like. Lumen and Zayo have recently revved up their NaaS offerings with new provisioning tools, and now AT&T and Verizon have marched into the growing data center connectivity market as well.
Nokia touches on its IP routing edge
Valley also touched upon how Nokia’s IP routing tech can also assist operators as they transition from Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to segment routing. Typically, operators either go for SR-MPLS, which still uses the traditional MPLS data plane to forward packets, or SRv6, which involves using an IPv6 header to steer traffic.
This transition has been going on for years but understanding what hardware is out there to support that upgrade remains a challenge, he said.
Valley explained Nokia’s technology allows an operator to, for instance, have one side of the network that’s still on MPLS while the other side is upgraded to segment routing – and its customers can’t tell the difference.
“We have the capability in the 7750 to stitch those networks together so that from the customer’s perspective, but it looks like one end-to-end service,” Valley said.
Apart from Zayo, Nokia is working with Vodafone Idea to upgrade the latter’s IP backhaul network in India. Nokia has also inked a five-year contract with European energy company E.ON SE to modernize its infrastructure across fiber, IP and optical.