Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, announced a partnership with Cornell University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to test and implement new network traffic control systems.
The company said the test network is configured and monitored from a cloud platform that connects to locally distributed software agents that control the forwarding plane.
Ongoing testing demonstrates some of the latest developments in SDN, including disaggregated networking with OpenFlow, the company added.
“As part of our commitment to support research and higher education, we are pleased to provide Cornell with a live production environment for deploying and testing the new traffic control solutions,” said Wilfred Kwan, COO of Reliance Communications (Enterprise) and Global Cloud Xchange.
“The environment includes the GCX Cloud X nodes and Layer 2 / Layer 3 networks across multiple locations in North America, Europe, and Asia. The virtual machines at each of the cloud nodes are fully interconnected via the GCX network,” the executive added.
Kwan said the “demonstrations show that real time applications, such as streaming video, can run smoothly over the network even when a network outage occurs.”
Cornell professor Kevin Tang, head of the university’s research group overseeing the project, said “In the event of such a failure, the new management solution re-converges network routes in about 100 milliseconds.”
“The recovery time is so swift that video streaming remains unaffected,” Tang said.
The project is currently being implemented from GCX’s Cloud X platform in Palo Alto, New York, Hong Kong and London, providing real-time network analytics that track how the new routing solutions dynamically load balance and quickly converge to the optimal traffic distribution.
GCX plans to expand the pilot across a larger production network with Waltz Networks, a startup based on the research and work at Cornell University, to further test the benefit of real-time adaptive traffic control for enterprise applications.