Lumina’s Flow Manager Handles White Boxes, MPLS, and BGP

Lumina Networks has implemented new features in its Flow Manager product that allow large network providers to begin evolving their BGP/MPLS networks toward software-defined networking (SDN). “People want to be able to run any services over any type of underlying infrastructure,” said Kevin Woods, VP of product management with Lumina Networks. “Our aim is to ease that problem by helping people not change the fundamental services they offer over networks but to be able to change out some of the infrastructure to things like white boxes.” Flow Manager now supports the ability to define VLAN, MPLS, and segment routing intent paths over low-cost switches, such as white boxes. It can also assign packet transport services to the paths including E-Line, E-Tree, L2VPN or L3VPN. To achieve these capabilities, Flow Manager uses the Lumina SDN Controller along with the OpenFlow and border gateway protocol (BGP) plugins provided by the controller.