Nokia  announced GigaOm analysts have ranked the company as aninnovation leader and outperformer for the second consecutive year for its data center fabricsolution, which enables data centers and cloud environments to easily scale, adapt and operate. Nokia was recognized in a recent GigaOm Radar report on the data center switching market in a review that included all notable industry vendors.

Details of the report can be found here.

Nokia’s rapidly expanding data center networking portfolio includes the 7250 IXR product suite of high-performance, high-density modular platforms designed for data center spines and data center wide area network connectivity deployments, and the 7220 IXR suite of high-performance, high-density, fixed configuration platforms for leaf and spine deployments in data centers. These two series of hardware products feature multiple variants that support port speeds from 1GE up to 800GE

Nokia’s data center networking portfolio runs the Service Router Linux (SR Linux) Network Operating System (NOS). SR Linux is an open, modular, extensible and resilient NOS built on an unmodified Linux kernel. The SR Linux NetOps Development Kit (NDK) enables application developers to take advantage of the underlying model-driven architecture of SR Linux. With the NDK, data center teams can develop new applications and operational tools in the language of their choice and have deep programmatic access to, and control over, the entire IXR switching system on which they are deployed.

Nokia ranks high on the NetOps suitability evaluation metric, having designed its Fabric Services System as an operational toolkit and management system to improve and scale operations across the entire operational life cycle of the data center fabric. The Fabric Services System enables highly automated design (day 0), deployment (day 1) and operations (day 2+) processes.Day 0 and 1 activities of the Fabric Services System include the fully automated design and deployment of a standard BGP-based IP fabric.

For Day 2+ operations, the Fabric Services System automates EVPN workload deployments andmaintenance activities. The Fabric Services System constantly monitors the fabric by leveraging telemetry, comparing its state with various intents, and analyzing the results to find configuration inconsistencies, faults or other deviations that may lead to network issues, and providingrecommended resolution paths to bring the fabric back to the intended state. The Fabric Services System also features a powerful Digital Twin capability that can be used to validate any changes done to the data center fabric before being deployed in production

Andrew Green, Analyst, at GigaOm, said: “Nokia’s IXR series switches deliver high-performance hardware with a fully programmable NOS built for NetOps from the ground up. Nokia ranks high on a variety of metrics, including automation and support for network design, deployment and operations.”

Rudy Hoebeke, Vice President of Product Management, IP Service Routing at Nokia,said: “Although Nokia is a relatively new entrant into the market, our data center fabric solution leverages the company’s 20+ years of experience in IP routing and network operations, helping customers take charge of their data center operations. GigaOm’s ranking validates the way we have approached the data center switching market and reflects the rapid changes occurring in this space, which is opening opportunities for disruption and innovation.”