Modernizing IT Networks with Nokia EDA and SR Linux

Mike Bushong and Pushpendra Pandey of Nokia open the company’s presentation by examining the widening gap between AI-driven industry hype and the day-to-day realities of enterprise network operations. Using Nokia’s own IT organization as a real-world case study, they explain why the company consolidated a complex, multi-vendor data center estate onto SR Linux and EDA, and what the migration delivered. The session opened Nokia’s appearance at Networking Field Day 41.

Bushong framed the session with a lesson from an SDN startup whose technically superior product failed because it could not survive contact with customers. He noted that capital spending by the top five hyperscalers grew from roughly $250 billion in 2024 to about $750 billion two years later, yet that activity is irrelevant to about 80 percent of the market, where only 20 to 30 percent of operations are automated. Pandey described the technical debt Nokia’s IT team had inherited through mergers: 21 data centers and roughly 14,000 ports built on HP, Cisco Nexus, and OmniSwitch platforms. Two days into his leadership role, a bent cable caused both firewalls in Nokia’s dual Finland data centers to go active-active, producing a five-hour outage, while spanning tree events routinely turned two-second network flaps into two-hour outages for fragile MES applications.

Pandey set a simple requirement for a network that was easy to deploy, migrate, and operate, and after an open vendor evaluation the team chose SR Linux with EDA. Over close to a year, it deployed, migrated applications to, and began operating all six large data centers. Since the start of the year, Nokia has had one data center outage, a failing SFP identified through EDA statistics and resolved in 40 minutes, compared with two to three outages a month previously. Pandey credited the shift to intent-based operations validated in a digital twin, arguing that an engineer’s expertise lies in arriving at the right configuration, not keying it into a hundred devices. Asked whether simplification merely relocates complexity, he traced much of it to configuration drift as engineers come and go, insisting that application owners should consume the network like a utility.