Corenova Technologies

Installing and configuring networking hardware was once the primary focus in enterprise networking. Now, with a shift towards open systems and Software Defined Networking (SDN), networking complexity is quickly escalating. SDN is gradually making inroads within the enterprise networking arena. A survey of 153 midsize and large North American organizations by Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc., found that 79 percent plan to have SDN in their data centers by 2017. By the end of 2016, more than 10,000 enterprises will have deployed SDN in their networks, predicts Gartner. “Interoperability amongst SDN applications remains one of the key concerns hampering innovation and driving up increased operational expenditures,” begins Peter Lee, Co-Founder and CTO, Corenova. “New networking technologies tend to introduce greater complications, inhibiting adoption and increasing operational support costs.”

Corenova, based in Los Angeles, CA, enables SDN developers to dynamically fuse complementary networking apps. Corenova software models networking elements to streamline integration and consequently circumvent traditional adaptation gap between the networking technology and the enterprise’s actual business requirements. “By breaking down the traditional operational silos within an organization, Corenova significantly reduces an enterprise’s overhead OPEX and fosters design-centric IT operations that deliver a true end-to-end user experience,” states Lee.

Corenova’s solutions are based on a data modeling language standard specification, YANG, which confers the ability to express any service, application or network attributes, such as performance, availability, and the operational actions needed to be taken to maintain those attributes. “Network application vendors’ responsibility is to provide controller logic that can be exercised appropriately at run-time, according to their designed data model for the service,” observes Lee.

By breaking down the traditional operational silos, Corenova significantly reduces an enterprise’s overhead OPEX and fosters design-centric IT operations

Corenova takes an application-centric approach to leverage their SDN, NFV, and data modeling expertise to unify and automate the integration workflows across the enterprise. “We are creating what we call a ‘Universal Exchange’ where the models about applications, networks, and infrastructure are published for enterprise consumption in order to streamline integration between existing models and the composition of new models into the exchange,” says Lee.

In a compelling example, NTT-DOCOMO, the largest mobile operator in Japan, required a robust solution for managing their virtualized infrastructure for running their network services. Initiated under OPNFV Promise Project, NTT-DOCOMO used Corenova to attain future resource reservation and capacity management. “Corenova served as the project lead for this critical initiative and worked with leaders like NTT-DOCOMO, AT&T, Sprint, NEC, and Ericsson,” affirms Lee. “We provided the necessary automation between various resource elements within the virtualized infrastructure, enabled capacity planning of future resource availability, and prioritized reservations for efficient utilization of infrastructure resources.”

Moving ahead, Corenova will leverage open standards and open source initiatives to expand the range of automatically-integrated applications. “Our innovation efforts are driven by our continued engagements with various open industry efforts such as ETSI NFV ISG, OPNFV, ONOS/XOS, Open-O, OSM and Open Stack.” asserts Lee. Corenova has also published a number of open source assets around YANG data modeling and have seen its growing adoption by the community. “Our community-first approach to innovation enables us to quickly validate our technology strategy and continuously refine our product roadmap,” concludes Lee.