NEC Corporation announced enhancements to its software defined networking product family, ProgrammableFlow. These enhancements allow enterprises and cloud operators to automate provisioning of high performance network services.

Included in the announcement is the release of UNIVERGE PF Series ProgrammableFlow Controller 3.0, the industry’s only OpenFlow controller that enables end-to-end quality of service (QoS) design and network management capabilities that support multiple software defined networks from a single console or application programming interface (API).

With version 3.0, NEC is redefining the role of the network from focusing primarily on connectivity to an intelligent, unified, and open fabric that enables dynamic service provisioning and scalable cloud solutions within a multilayer high performance fabric.

“These enhancements to NEC’s UNIVERGE PF Series meet the growing need for virtual networks using OpenFlow technologies in support of cloud data centers and business networks,” said Hiroyuki Watanabe, General Manager, Global Solutions, NEC. “Additionally, they satisfy the demand for lower installation and operational costs while providing greater security and higher quality.”

By utilizing new UNIVERGE PF Series with integrated API capabilities, network operators can focus on strategic projects by offloading configuration work. The API framework allows third party applications, such as network management or orchestration systems to directly interact with the network through a well-defined functional approach. Third party systems can make on-demand calls to the API to create, edit, and delete virtual networks, as well as to add and remove policies. This new model allows network administrators to focus on new services as opposed to the time consuming tasks like QoS provisioning and provisioning network isolation.

ProgrammableFlow 3.0 expands the scalability of the ProgrammableFlow physical and virtual network fabric, allowing organizations to buy only the network capacity they need now and to scale over time. With this release, the number of switches that can be controlled is greatly expanded and operators can build networks with more than 4,096 virtual LAN (VLAN) ID configurations.

The enhanced UNIVERGE PF6800 ProgrammableFlow Controller was already adopted by NTT Communications as part of its new “BizHosting Enterprise Cloud” service platform. BizHosting uses OpenFlow technologies to provide borderless cloud services that enable integrated operations of numerous data centers both domestically and internationally. This global scale ICT infrastructure is flexibly controlled and takes only a few minutes to remotely complete connections between data centers that conventionally took several days.