Ciena Corporation has released its next-generation control plane software which offers advanced virtualization for the Wide Area Network (WAN) and allows for rich policy-based control right to the edge of the network.

Ciena’s control plane is used for mesh restoration, automated services creation and service differentiation in mission-critical environments.

It said its new OneConnect control plane now offers bandwidth savings of 40% and latency reduction of 30% in high meshed networks.

Ciena SVP and CTO Steve Alexander said the control plane has been designed to allow the network to keep up with new demands, while reducing its management.

“Ciena’s intelligent control plane software acts as the brain of the network by allowing service providers to fine tune their networks to be more intelligent and to quickly respond to changing network demands, without manual intervention,” Alexander said.

OneConnect is virtualized, with Optical VPN services that can work off of existing switched infrastructure to offer secure, private line-services on a virtual fiber network.

It also has latency-aware routing capabilities which can pre determine parameters to meet particular SLAs or customer requirements and self-healing capabilities, allowing networks to be more resilient. This means traffic can be rerouted can reroute if the network is effected by natural disaster or unexpected fiber cuts.

OneConnect supports ASON and GMPLS and can run SONET/SDH and OTN control plane capabilities simultaneously.