Enterprise Connect: Avaya's Sochi SimplicityEnterprise Connect: Avaya's Sochi Simplicity

President and CEO Kevin Kennedy took the keynote stage and described how simple, powerful networks are needed to run real-time applications.

Tuesday's second Enterprise Connect keynote came from Avaya President and CEO Kevin Kennedy. As described in our No Jitter preview of the speech, Kennedy focused on the fabric of the network that supports applications. The hook was Avaya's successful deployment of the 54-Terabit-backbone network that supported the Sochi Winter Olympics. The network enjoyed 100% uptime as it carried traffic from 120,000 mobile devices and 36 HD IPTV channels, in addition to telephony and workstations, Kennedy explained.

The key was the simplicity of the fabric switching architecture that drove the network, Kennedy said. This architecture uses Shortest Path Bridging technology to provision a simple core architecture with VPNs, pushing all complexity out to the edge devices. "Sochi was a success in simplicity," Kennedy said.

He used the Sochi example to launch into a broader discussion of the need for simplicity in network infrastructures that support applications including realtime. And he came back to it at the end of his talk by noting the difference between the networking technology the company used to support the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, versus this year's Sochi network. Kennedy said the 2010 system had 2-3 times the hardware capex of Sochi's, required five times as many provisioning steps, and offered only 5-9 uptime versus Sochi's 6-9 benchmark.

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