Next Generation, Service Provider "Mesh" Packet Architecture

After almost six months of requirements definition writing, research, vendor interviews and a rigorous RFI process we've gotten the results back from the vendors.  Comes down to three vendors.  It'll be interesting to see what each came up with as we work to get our customer their next generation "mesh" network for cloud and private VPN services to customers on the island.

Work also involves heavy Quality-of-Service testing including prioritization via policing and queuing techniques.  Pretty standard stuff in today's carrier packet equipment.  Interesting to note that optical manufacturers and enterprise packet manufacturers are coming at the next-gen packet story a bit different from two different sides of the market.  One from the layer1 to 2 approach and the other from the layer 3 to 2.  Layer 1 to 2 seems a bit more inflexible but only time will tell as we conduct our feasibility studies.

Excited to see some feedback on our request for Software Defined Networking (SDN)-Capable solutions.  Especially since we've been working on building contrail (Juniper) and floodlight (BigSwitch) virtual machines in our lab to test out SDN.