The cloud era is here -- do you think your network is ready? As a network operator, you will need to deliver on-demand network services that are just as dynamic as the cloud services that now dominate network traffic. You face many challenges in making this happen.
But a new study from ACG Research shows you can achieve this quickly and profitably with advancements that are available now. Their analysis of the new Alcatel-Lucent Network Services Platform in a national network scenario showed you can cut service creation time, generate more revenue, and achieve significant ROI very quickly.
Network complexity & waste block profitability
So what’s stopping you with the present mode of operation? Complexity and waste are getting in the way of your profitability.
The business processes used to plan, build, and operate network infrastructure involve manual handoffs between the network engineering processes that control network resources and the network operations processes that provision services. Each is further divided into separate packet and transport silos. OSSs/IT and element management systems are forced to interoperate with the network through multiple, complex, and vendor-specific APIs.
The impact of these limitations can be crippling as operators make the transition from static to dynamic network services.
Carrier SDN: Automate & optimize for true freedom
Carrier SDN offers a fresh way forward. The NSP leverages Carrier SDN to unify service automation and network optimization in one integrated platform. The result is that network operators can deliver dynamic services quickly, efficiently, and at great scale.
The NSP accomplishes this by:
ACG Research test results
To put the NSP to the test, ACG Research made comparisons between an NSP-enabled and PMO-enabled national network used to deliver bandwidth calendaring and bandwidth on-demand services to a target market of 10,000 large enterprises.
ACG found the following:
Operators can achieve the dramatic increase in revenue with the NSP, compared to the PMO, because it can improve capacity utilization by 40 percent. This utilization improvement enables profitable operation at a price point that is 29 percent lower than the PMO price point. This, in turn, stimulates demand relative to what is possible using the PMO. The NSP’s 58 percent faster service creation time also provides a prime-mover advantage and advances revenue recognition.
To be as dynamic as the cloud services that now dominate network traffic, you will need to:
We believe the NSP can help you make this happen. Download the Carrier SDN business case and register for our upcoming webinar series to find out how you can cut service creation time and grow revenue.
In the search for more knowledge about the incredible pace of innovation and change that is driving major network transformation by enterprises and service providers; it is always a good idea to review the postings of those on the front lines. This is why the recent blog by Marten Hauville, Principal Solutions Architect (ANZ) for cloud networking specialist Alcatel-Lucent’s Nuage Networks business unit and Co-Organizer of the Australian OpenStack User Group, caught my attention.
Hauville in his blog raises and answers a timely question, “What’s up with the data center network?”
The reason this is so important is as Hauville notes, “We are in the midst of a transition in IT. Over the last couple of years the cloud has morphed from a disruptive technology on the periphery of IT into the mainstream.” In short, the world is going cloud and data center-centric.
Of the three pillars—Compute, Storage and Network— that are the foundation of the move to a data center-centric, software defined and controlled applications-based world, network historically has been a laggard when it comes to transitioning to next generation capabilities. However, as Hauville explains this is no longer the case. Indeed, thanks to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) the pace of innovation and adoption of cloud-centric transformations is accelerating. Hence, what’s up in regards to the data center network is so relevant.
Hauville starts with the assertion that: “Business competitive advantage these days is dictated by swiftness and agility, increasingly around business-driven applications that attain this advantage in the marketplace. This new edge is being pushed hard by enterprises that are adopting web-scale capabilities through software, drawing them into their inherent business products and practices.” He goes on to cite chapter and verse about how and why “Cloud IT” has become literally mission critical for enterprises in Australia and New Zealand.
Having made the case for Cloud IT, Hauville poses the question about how to enable the cloud to drive greater agility across the whole business. The answer is transforming the data center network. Yet, as he notes the Network presents some interesting challenges. In fact, the inability of Network to keep pace with Compute and Storage he says has led to a situation that, “Limits the overall efficiencies businesses could achieve from both their virtualization and initial private cloud investments.”
Cracking the network constraint challenge
What really caught my attention was the following statement by Hauville that: “This fundamental network constraint is not caused by the hardware capacities or bandwidth of the network. Far from it. The capacity and speed aspects of data centre networking have tracked well ahead of compute power with the availability and density of 10Gigabit, 40Gigabit and even 100Gigabit. The issue is due to limited evolution in the management, configuration and dynamism of these networks.”
I will not spoil why I have bookmarked the blog as a must reread reference. Hauville’s explanation of how the addition of next generation management, configuration, i.e., orchestration and control, can bring out the maximum value of all of the other technology upgrades taking place in data centers. He then goes on to make a very cogent case for Software Defined Networking (SDN) implementation as the means for achieving data center operational excellence.
Hauville closes with a caveat worth considering, “So if this future is set, and the underlying technology decision been made the key question now is not if you choose SDN but how you choose the right SDN implementation.”
Unfortunately, despite the embrace of traditional solutions of open source solutions for SDN, not all SDN solutions are alike. At an even higher level the caveat also should resonate since not all virtualization initiatives in general are not alike. The facts are that interoperability issues are going to be a major challenge for SDN. They are also going to be an issue for the NFV solutions that service providers are beginning implement. It will be fascinating to see how far and how fast the solution buyers will push the vendors to resolve these issues as internetworking and not just what goes on inside a data center or a federation of networked private cloud data centers comes to the fore.
Circling back to the question raised at the top about what’s up with data center networking, the answer is in two words, “a lot.” And, the caveat to this answer is that same as Hauville’s. Choosing the data center networking transformation technology that is right for your organization is a complicated challenge since there are options and vendors to be evaluated in the context of you unique requirements. However, such transformations are no longer about if but when, and because of the nature of how business is changing a sense of urgency about making the right move should be a driver.
]]>A recent Alcatel-Lucent application note, The large enterprise has changed, gave an interesting snapshot of large enterprise IT today.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent, The large enterprise has changed
Based on this, it stressed that large enterprises have networking and communications infrastructure needs that are surprisingly similar to those of the network operators themselves, thanks to the growing importance of having employees connected with the bandwidth, security and reliability they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
What this means is that large enterprises should start thinking like a network operator. This includes having telecom-grade IP platform infrastructure in place to support employee connectivity.
Specifically, large enterprise should think about using data center automation that can take advantage of technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN). With something like Alcatel-Lucent’s Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, large enterprises can deliver SDN capabilities including centralized, policy-driven networking, simplified configuration and compliance automation.
Large enterprises also should have virtualized network services that can leverage SDN to create wide area networks (WANs) that can use best of breed technology and avoid proprietary lock-in.
In terms of the cloud, large enterprises are overwhelmingly deploying private clouds. Large enterprises should make sure they have a turnkey solution in place to make those deployments easy and also flexible enough to support web-based applications and mobile apps.
In thinking like telecoms, large enterprises additionally should consider optical transport and data center interconnect.
Optical transport delivers the bandwidth and speed that large enterprises need to keep up with network demand, and data center interconnect delivers the flexibility and capacity for faster service turn-up and assured business continuity while improving asset utilization and lowering costs. Data center interconnect brings scalable, secure, high-performing, multi-site data center connectivity for the cloud era.
Network connectivity is a key component of every business, especially for large enterprises. As a result, businesses need to learn from network operators and consider investing in similar technologies when it comes to their own connectivity projects.
Cable multiservice operators (MSOs) have embraced the need for broadband data, and with good reason. Broadband data demand is expected to grow by 560 percent over the next five years, according to a recent Bell Labs study, largely driven by demand for pay TV and video and cloud traffic generated from the proliferation of data centers.
Cable MSOs are doing well by their entertainment services bundled with residential broadband offers, but this revenue is under siege by the likes over over-the-top (OTT) video services such as Netflix and Apple. Hence, cable MSOs are constantly in search of new revenue opportunities.
One strong candidate for new revenue is commercial services for small and medium-sized business (SMBs). This area generated 10 percent of MSO revenue in 2014, according to Gilbert Marciano, CMO Strategic Marketing - Customer & Market Insight Senior Manager at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent TechZine posting appropriately titled, Differentiate your SMB services with big data. In fact, it is noted that in the U.S. Comcast and Time Warner Cable together generated roughly $5.5 billion from the segment in 2013.
Specifically cited is the reality that cable MSOs are in a good place to offer cloud analytics services, since the infrastructure requirements to properly leverage big data is not cheap. Cable MSOs already have this critical infrastructure and thus have the ability to offer SMB analytics as a cloud service.
To offer such analytics services, however, cable MSOs must address the architectural challenge of connecting hundreds of geographically dispersed SMBs. As Marciano notes, this can be done with a distributed datacenter architecture that is connected by a multi-country IP network in the cloud.
“An ideal solution is to deploy software-defined networking (SDN), which brings this elasticity and automation,” Marciano explains. “Network elements are implemented as software (virtual machines) on a distributed cloud infrastructure whilst SDN brings scaling, responsiveness, and automation to the required interconnectivity.”
This removes the boundaries throughout and across the data centers, dynamically provisioning for a high number of separate VLANs, low bandwidth, high latency, and lack of resilience.
“It is suited to situations with highly volatile usage patterns and where resources requirements increase/decrease depending on loads,” says, Marciano. “This solution creates opportunity for cable operators.”
Indeed it does, and with cable MSOs already making significant headway in the business broadband sector, particularly with SMBs, analytics is a natural addition to their solutions portfolios.
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Today’s technology now allows a single fiber strand to carry up to 17.6 terabits per second of traffic. That’s the equivalent of transmitting 88 Blu-ray discs in a second. This ultra-broadband capability, and the new software-defined networks that service providers are embracing, have important impacts on optical networks further upstream.
“…we need to stay in the light/photonic domain as long as possible in order to reduce the cost associated with repeatedly converting wavelength photonic signals to electrical,” notes Scott Larrigan, senior marketing manager of IPR&T product and solution marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent TechZine posting, CDC-F optical networks propel us forward, and in the podcast embedded below.
While carriers already add to their fiber optic capacity by introducing different colors, or wavelengths, to move to 100gbps, 200gbps, and even 400gbps capacities, that only gets them part way there. There’s also now a need to more efficiently route high-capacity wavelengths in a cost effective manner, and an optical networking technology called CDC-F can allow for that.
“Together, CDC-F and SDN technologies are set to propel our networks forward – and make what’s science fiction today, a reality in the not too distant future,” says Larrigan. They enable what Alcatel-Lucent calls agile optical networking.
CDC-F optical networks are colorless, directionless, and contentionless (thus CDC). Their ability to dynamically optimize and reroute wavelength connections helps carriers recover network capacity so they have a longer lifespan. They lessen requirements for optical to electrical to optical conversions, saving capital equipment and power costs in the process. And with CDC-F, there’s no need for on-site visits to change or route wavelength connectivity.
Alcatel-Lucent today offers a CDC-F wavelength routing solution the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch, which can both efficiently route wavelengths at scale, and deliver in-band per wavelength OAM that can precisely isolate wavelength issues throughout the network. A North America Tier 1 service provider will be leveraging this offering in its national optical core network.
]]>Have you ever gotten your hands dirty and really implemented an NFV or SDN application? Six teams from academia and industry in Israel and Europe can answer with a resounding yes! These teams gathered in Haifa at the 4-day 2015 Winter School and Hackathon event, organized by Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand team and Israel’s leading Institute of Technology, Technion. The event offered a full program to get acquainted with the fundamental concepts behind cloud computing, software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Eighty participants gained a clear understanding of enabling technologies, NFV and SDN challenges and barriers, and how to overcome the obstacles of implementing virtualized network functions in the cloud.
The program started with two days of in-depth technical lectures covering the principles of the cloud, server and network virtualization, OpenStack, and high performance packet processing for NFV among other topics. Following this, participants had the opportunity to get hands-on experience with CloudBand, an advanced NFV platform, learn how NFV changes operator roles and responsibilities, and how operational processes can be automated to reduce operational expenditure. One of the use cases shown was the automated deployment of an NFV application in a distributed NFV infrastructure.
After acquiring a solid foundation in the first three days, six teams took up the challenge to develop a real NFV solution. The task was to virtualize the DHCP function of a residential gateway. Virtualizing customer premises equipment, such as residential gateways, and moving some of their complex functions into the cloud has been identified as a promising strategy to reduce cost and increase service provider ability to quickly deploy new services.
The winner of the challenge was a team headed by Mladen Tomic from the University of Rijeka, Croatia, who implemented a solution that not only delivered the cloud based DHCP service, but was also capable of scaling to adapt to changing service traffic. Mladen said, “I pretty much enjoyed the whole event, from attending lectures on hot and interesting topics, exchanging ideas with other participants and having some great fun both learning and competing in the hackathon.” Congratulations to the winners and to all participants for their highly motivated participation!
The future of NFV will depend on a generation of students and engineers capable of grasping the opportunities and challenges of NFV, and we are convinced they will be the creators of advanced NFV solutions that we cannot imagine today. Anyone can join and create their own applications on a public version of the hackathon. VNF and NFV technology providers can also apply to participate in the CloudBand Ecosystem Program.
One of the things that will characterize 2015 is the trend that started picking up momentum in 2014 that communications service providers (CSPs) have developed a sense of urgency about transforming their networks. It used to be that if you were a network operator you could invest with some level of assurance that the hardware and the associated software to run it would be core to your network for possible decades before becoming obsolete. However, as everyone in the industry knows, this is no longer the case.
As the world becomes more software-centric in terms of service creation, delivery, agility, security and performance— to meet the tsunami of data heading operator’s way and to allow network operators to maintain their relevance as ecosystem hubs rather than “dumb pipe” providers—cost efficient and effective operational excellence and the need to be fast-to-market and fast in the market with innovative services and enhanced customer experiences have become paramount. It is why so much attention is being paid to thing like Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (VFV).
The need for speed has become (pardon the turn of phrase) hyper-critical. However, with recognition of the need to transform and do so rapidly should also come the recognition that network operators cannot transform rapidly and successfully on their own. It may not “take a village” to get transformations in the fast lane and done right, but it certainly takes trusted partners. In fact, Olivier Gueret , Senior Marketing Manager Wireless Transmission at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent TechZine article, Rely on partners for your network transformation, makes a nice case as to the vital role partners can play in helping develop and expedite successful network transformations.
In fact, Gueret explains why professional services in particular are important in network transformation projects for a variety of reasons including filling in skills gaps and having experience in all of the complexities of such projects. After all, network transformations from my own observations are like trying to change jet engines while a plane is at 30,000 feet. They are extremely complicated, especially since every customer is unique, and the plane needs to stay in the air and perform at optimal levels even as parts are replaced. There is also interesting challenges regarding the costs of change and how to quantify that the ends justify the means.
Gueret in his posting posits the case made above, i.e., network transformation is no longer a nicety it is a necessity. He goes on to highlight that this really is a case of different strokes for different folks. In fact, he points to a recent Ovum study that when it comes to the reasons to transform operators are divided in two camps:
As he notes, both approaches have the same goals of transforming their network to increase revenues and reduce OPEX, they certainly diverge as to how. This leads to falling into some traps which reliance on a trusted partner with deep network transformation expertise can help mitigate.
Gueret points out the hidden costs of “home-made” network transformations which can translate into additional costs. Cited additional costs from going it by yourself if you are an operator include: costs of unexpected delays caused by poor planning and sequencing; costs from poor quality assessments of infrastructure capabilities; and costs from over-dimensioning, .e.g., spending on things that will not be used or cannot be optimized.
The case for relying on a trusted partner
As Gueret details, the case for relying on a trusted professional services partner is a compelling one. He notes that such a partner, “Can define, plan and execute a transformation efficiently, even if most operators have in-house competencies to do it themselves.”
The benefits he cites are:
The article goes on to point out how professional services are part of a broader set of capabilities for upgrading network infrastructure, and that partnering on a variety of fronts can enable operators, regardless of where they are coming from, to shift their business models. This means relying on a variety of trusted partners to not only to prepare and execute their network transformation but also to manage and maintain their networks.
This would let operators shift their business model to focus on their core activity: managing their commercial offers and their customers. This is a reality that is summed up well in the chart below from the posting.
Figure 3. Enabling operators focus on customer facing activities
The message is a powerful one. The urgency is there for operators to transform their networks for a host of well known reasons relating to operations costs and competitive necessities, and despite a cultural history to do almost everything themselves, network operators by relying on the expertise of others have the opportunity to meet their cost objectives and concentrate on what they do best. This means not just listening to the voice of the customer but hearing them and reacting quickly in ways that encourage loyalty and the willingness to trust the operator when evaluating the purchase of new products and services.
]]>Their networks, which traditionally have been based on turnkey network elements running software on purpose-built hardware, are moving to a software-centric model. In this model the true value lies in the software, while the hardware is typically of the commercial-off-the-shelf variety.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the name of this new architecture, which not only embraces the model of instituting network functionality in software and running it on industry-servers, but also allows applications and services to leverage those resources whenever and wherever they are.
The success of virtualization in the data center has demonstrated the power of running network capabilities on virtual machines. That’s powerful because it allows networks to be more fluid so they can meet shifting demands. It’s also powerful because it can result in cost savings, given less – and less specialized – hardware is required, and given virtualized environments (in which one server can host various network elements) tend to consume less power than environments featuring a collection of appliances.
NFV also can help facilities-based network operators effectively reinvent themselves to be more agile, so they can better compete with faster and often smaller over-the-the-top service providers.
Reducing equipment costs and power consumption, and expediting the introduction of new services and features were among the key goals laid out by ETSI’s NFV group, which got the network functions virtualization movement rolling a couple years ago. Founders of the NFV group within the European standards body included AT&T, BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Verizon.
Network operators that want to get started with NFV, suggests Andreas Lemke, marketing lead of the CloudBand NFV platform at Alcatel-Lucent, should take advantage of what he describes as “5 must-have attributes of an NFV platform.” These include:
Finally, and as important as all of the technology, Lemke says that those wishing to get started with NFV should select partners that can provide the same five 9s reliability, quality of service, and security in the new virtualized environment as they enjoy with their existing networks.
There is a growing industry consensus that NFV will become the architecture of the future for networks that are agile, applications friendly, high-performance, interoperable and secure. In fact, not only is there consensus but there is traction in the market for NFV solutions as service providers look to transform themselves to be as accommodating as possible in a profitable manner to the dynamics of rapidly changing market requirements. However, not all NFV solutions are alike which is why the Lemke attributes list is one worth consideration as part of an NFV evaluation.
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As populations increasingly migrate from rural to urban areas, power utilities face new economic challenges and opportunities around creating and maintaining adaptive grid communications network infrastructure.
The dynamics of this global change are fairly well known, although how to address the challenges isn’t so obvious. For example, cities consume three quarters of energy and contribute 80 percent of CO2 emissions globally, according to a recent report in The Guardian. How can that energy be most effciently delivered, with minimal environmental impact?
Consensus is emerging that what’s needed are smarter, safer, greener cities. Governments and municipalities are under pressure to invest in sustainable infrastructure capable of efficiently delivering services to citizens and workers.
There’s a pretty compelling smart grid transformation opportunity for public-private partnerships embedded in this evolution. Together, telecom service providers and information and communication technology (ICT) providers can bring in their assets, expertise and experience to help power utilities meet goals for smart grid applications.
Smarter energy management for power utilities is an imperative, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve.
ICT is an important driver of economic competiveness, livability and environmental sustainability associated with smart grid transformation for smart cities, noted Marc Jadoul and Jacques Vermeulen of Alcatel-Lucent in a recent TechZine article, “Smart practices for building smart cities.”
“The right ICT infrastructure will affect the way each city will be created and evolve,” Jadoul and Vermeulen noted. “It will enable smart cities to include vastly enhanced sustainable areas, such as smart buildings, smart infrastructures (water, energy, heat, and transportation) and smart services (e-substitutes and e-services for travel, health, education, and entertainment), which drastically change the urban experience for city dwellers and travellers.”
Using broadband networks to provide access for high-capacity communications infrastructure, the city net becomes the backbone of a smart city. Creating that backbone requires investment in an open data approach flexible for a variety of applications that benefit both the city and its population.
This infrastructure foundation opens up opportunities to optimize a city's public infrastructure, including a smart grid to reduce CO2 footprint and lower energy bills. For example, wireless sensors can continuously monitor and control lighting.
Other important aspects of an effective smart grid include real-time remote grid monitoring substation automation, smart metering, and green energy devices.
]]>It feels like it was just a few months ago when you could read articles in the trade press lumping together SDN and NFV with NFV being a form of SDN or vice versa. Yes, both somehow are about virtualization and about converting hardware into software. Today – after numerous proofs-of-concept run by service provides around the globe – we know the role of SDN as virtually indispensable for NFV solutions that aspire to deliver the kind of agility and operational simplification we all expect from NFV. Only SDN can deliver quickly enough the (virtual) networks needed for newly deployed network functions. Alcatel-Lucent has recently demonstrated a complete virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) including a virtual IMS/VoLTE deployed in less than 30 minutes.
NFV and SDN enable on-demand service composition by steering traffic through a sequence of middle-box service functions (service function chaining), such as firewalls and traffic optimization. For example, an enterprise or consumer customer can use a self-service portal to check off the desired functions, which causes virtual network functions to be deployed or scaled and (per-subscriber) routing policies to be changed automatically (flow-through provisioning).
Likewise, NFV responds to changing traffic within minutes by spinning up additional virtual machines within the same data center but also in a data center close to where the traffic demand originates. NFV enables rapid software upgrades while containing the risk of service degradation. We are even seeing demand on the horizon for adopting Devops models in the telco domain.
A classical operational model with change requests being sent to the networking department is no longer up to the task. The network needs to be as dynamic as the server infrastructure and it is clear that only SDN can fill the bill. This will be a stepwise process and not just any SDN will be suitable for NFV. Telco networks are not only about dropping packets in on one side and the packets popping back out at their destinations. Telco networks are designed to deliver enough capacity, high enough performance, security and high availability for the critical services running over them in an end-to-end geo-distributed environment.
Clearly, SDN is right for NFV but it needs to be the right SDN. Read the white paper “The right SDN is right for NFV” to learn about critical network requirements for NFV, SDN use cases and four stages of SDN integration into NFV bringing different degrees of reward to service providers. Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand™ and Nuage Networks® VSP are discussed as an example integrated SDN/NFV solution.
]]>Large enterprises increasingly resemble public network service providers as they manage access, transport and network routing while controlling devices and sessions. Whether businesses build their own or buy their communications services through a public provider, the IP communications architectures are looking remarkably similar.
“I’ve noticed that both private service operators (CIOs of large enterprises) and public service providers are implementing very similar solutions around the globe,” wrote Oliver Krahn in a recent TechZine article, 6 Steps that Improve Communications Services.
Link for graphic.
He has noticed that successful service providers are all more or less taking the following six steps when it comes to building their IP communications architecture. Firms building out their communications services would be wise to pay attention.
First, firms are moving to an IP communications architecture to enable a whole new conversation experience. With so many communications options, the value of having a unified inbox that collects all of these communications services is invaluable to users. And this means moving to all-IP.
Second, APIs are being used to expose network-based IP communications applications.
“This lets them share innovation opportunities with partners while developing carrier-grade and real-time web-communications strategies that keep them current on new modes of communications,” noted Krahn. “Beyond this, more visionary CIOs are exploring next-generation IP communications architectures that may replace today’s PSTN.”
Third, content strategies are being adjusted to take advantage of on-net content delivery networks at the network edge and transparent caching to handle the volume of video data now being moved across the network.
Fourth, they are using small cell networks to avoid bottlenecks and access gaps.
“By deploying multi-standard, small-cell base stations, a large enterprise can achieve cost-effective 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi connectivity,” noted Krahn. “It can then be handed over to a trusted mobile provider to light them up with licensed spectrum. In-building coverage for any size venue and any number of users is also part of the mix; so is reducing the cost of delivering ultra-broadband access in a multi-operator deployment with low-cost digital distributed antenna systems.”
Converged virtual private networks also are being employed to deliver a seamless experience to enterprise users. Enterprise service gateways (ESGs) offer a seamless experience to enterprise users independent of the access bearer and the device. They deliver scalability, high performance and carrier-grade resiliency for VPN services.
This combination of capabilities allows the ESG to concurrently replace the mobile gateway (PGW, GGSN), PE router and border gateway, simplifying the network.
Finally, Krahn has noticed that successful solutions are leveraging cloud-based applications and network functions virtualization (NFV).
“Private and public service providers are realizing that the future of telecommunications networks will be based on virtualizing key network functions,” he noted. “These cloud platform components ease service deployment, automate management and clear the path to cost-effective growth. At the same time, NFV-ready applications, an advanced NFV platform and an NFV partner ecosystem are crucial for achieving the goals of cloud-based applications.”
As noted, Alcatel-Lucent has a white paper, Six Steps to Attractive Communications Services, that fully outlines these six steps used by successful communication service providers, whether enterprises or public providers.
“GM factories reduce production in aftermath of Japan earthquake 2011”, “Hard disk shortage due to Thailand flooding 2012“, “Drug shortages continue to vex doctors”, “China factory fire sends memory chip prices to three-year high (2013)”. Industrial supply chains are becoming increasingly tenuous as they are thinned out and stretched across the globe. Raw materials are available from fewer and fewer specialized suppliers and warehouses are eliminated for just-in-time production. Small, local incidents affect the supply of goods on a global scale.
In the IT industry we are seeing a similar trend. Enterprises are moving their applications and data to the cloud, but this cloud is often highly centralized and not as resilient, free flowing, or efficient as one might think. Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider in the world, is serving their global customers from no more than two handfuls of locations. Netflix and other companies have experienced major outages due to single failures in the cloud they used.
So what does this mean for NFV?
Traditionally, telco networks have been highly distributed with thousands of central offices spread across the country. But today’s high-speed fiber connections and powerful server farms give service providers the option to re-architect and potentially centralize their network. Clearly, highly centralized deployments are cheaper to manage than many small, scattered locations. But what works for many Web and Internet services is not always the best choice for carrier grade services such as mobile voice, video and data for the enterprise.
Telefonica and Alcatel-Lucent have analyzed factors, such as latency, high availability, and security, that determine geographical placement decisions for different applications in telco networks. NFV and cloud technologies allow service providers to choose the best locations depending on the needs of the applications, and avoid the kind of dramatic effects that we are seeing in other industries. At the end of the day this is a supply chain and logistics challenge where ensuring goods are available to users whenever they want them, the supplier with a short delivery chain, i.e., a distributed network, tends to be the most successful.
To manage the cost of a distributed architecture, service providers need an NFV and SDN platform that automates infrastructure and application lifecycle and provides an aggregate view of the distributed NFV resources. Since its launch in 2012, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand NFV Platform, together with the Nuage Networks SDN Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), has been designed for this type of flexible, distributed NFV network architecture.
For more details, read the Telefonica/Alcatel-Lucent white paper “Why distribution matters in NFV”. Related postings include:
]]>We live in exciting times – again. I had been wondering if there was still room for fundamental innovation, for technological disruption – the worn out word. We had the Internet bubble that burst 2001/2002. We had the advent of the smartphone in the recent years. Great innovation, but somehow they reached a plateau. Faster processors, larger screens? It doesn’t seem to make a real difference. Apple’s engine showed the first signs of sputtering.
And yet, there is something brewing behind the scenes that makes the engineer’s heart beat faster: NFV and SDN, a bold new vision about the future of networks (read these blog posts about understanding Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networks). Network functions are to be reduced to pure software - doing away with all the special purpose chips, circuit boards, and cabinets into which we have poured our brains to deliver the ultimate in features, performance, and reliability.
Telefonica is one of the original masterminds of the NFV idea, and a partner who truly shares with us the excitement about this new technology. I had the pleasure to work with a multi-national team dedicated to making NFV a reality. The objective of this proof of concept was to drive the vision of NFV and develop a blueprint for the future production of NFV infrastructure. We installed the first node of our CloudBand NFV Platform in one city, and then a few months later extended the installation with a second node in another major city hundreds of kilometers away. One of the interesting questions to explore was the remote management of a distributed NFV infrastructure. How quickly can we deploy cloud nodes in additional locations? Can we really operate the infrastructure without having to send engineers and operations staff around the country? How can we set up the network between multiple sites to react dynamically to changes to network function deployment?
This latter question points to another major topic tackled in project: the relationship between NFV and SDN. Virtualizing the network, SDN should be a perfect addition to NFV as a platform to virtualize network functions. In fact, we deployed the Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand™ NFV Platform along with an SDN solution from Nuage Networks. This allowed us to push virtual network functions (vNF) policies into the Nuage Networks policy repository. The SDN solution then knew how data traffic from the VNF should be handled not only in a single data center but automatically extending across multiple data centers.
For me, the project was a milestone on the way to our NFV vision. It was the first project covering more than one site. It was the first project with SDN integration. It was an excellent opportunity to discuss with our friends and colleagues at Telefonica many of the questions that arise only as we go from the theory of the architectures developed at ETSI to the real networks, even if they are not yet serving real customers. One challenge was the deployment of the proof-of-concept alongside a live network. This meant we had to work within a very narrow maintenance window. And not only that: we had to undergo all the qualification and certification stages of a standard appliance-based solution being introduced into the network. At first, we were surprised of this requirement as NFV was invented to cut down exactly on these operational processes. But we quickly understood the situation. Once the NFV infrastructure was qualified and certified, any virtual network functions running on it no longer would have to go through the same process. There may still be a qualification and certification process for virtual network functions, but this process can be more automated and doesn’t have to repeat some of the steps already done for the NFV infrastructure.
Another experience from the project relates to the culture of collaboration and debate. If we want to be successful in NFV we must be disruptive and challenge each other and challenge the overcome ways. Maybe we, Alcatel-Lucent, were a tougher partner for Telefonica than others on this front. In one case, the Telefonica operations team came to us and requested user-configurable VM sizes (flavors). We did not immediately comply with this requirement, but put up the challenge: does it make sense to have so many sizes? What is the impact on efficiency of resource usage? Together we concluded that we must adopt web-scale MOPs (Method of Procedure) to be really efficient and lean in operations. Much like for this operations team, we need to be there for the service providers. Together think differently. Collaboration is the word in NFV.
I am convinced I will be able to witness how virtualization and cloud will lead to massive changes in the telco industry. I am glad to be able to contribute to these changes. Could there be any better place to be?