Dec 2014 / Jan 2015 Volume 16 Issue 6 ISSN 1745-1736
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TALKING HEADS
JDSU's Sue Spradley explains how NFV demands a new approach ■
ORCHESTRATION
Why NFV needs the structure orchestration can provide ■
CAPACITY PLANNING
How will CSPs deliver best practice in virtual networks?
NFV isn’t just a concept – now it’s getting serious
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction Network functions virtualisation (NFV) is less of a subject for debate and excitement than it was two months ago when we published the VanillaPlus CEO Guide to NFV Part One. As is entirely usual with introduction of a disruptive new technology that promises much, the debate has moved on from CSPs assessing whether they should adopt NFV and the concentration now is on how they will adopt NFV
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t’s important to understand that, for CSPs, although virtualisation has existed in the enterprise and the data centre for many years, this is new ground. Added to that, CSPs face different challenges because they will be relying on NFV and SDN to run critical infrastructure such as packet voice services. The stakes are higher and the demands are different.
page C7, it is becoming the brain of the new network. The challenges that CSPs must address in their deployments of NFV are mounting as plans move from concept to reality. It is still early days for the technology and the good news is a significant amount of research, standardisation and trialling is underway. The end of the journey is far from being in sight but there is a clearer sense that we at least have a destination in mind.
That requires a new approach which begins right at the start with test and assurance functions, argues Sue Spradley on page C4. She points out that virtualised networks will require at least the same level of testing and assurance visibility as physical networks.
Earlier it was more a case of jumping on the passing NFV bandwagon in the hope it was the right vehicle, heading in the right direction. Now, CSPs are looking out for the correct vehicle to transport their business into the virtualised era. Their not looking to hitch a ride on the first scooter that passes them anymore.
She also emphasises that having an NFV orchestrator that is able to request good network configuration and reconfiguration decisions is a vital enabler for virtualised service provision by CSPs. Orchestration is the management enabler for NFV and, as Kate O’Flaherty explores on
George Malim
IN THIS ISSUE TALKING HEADS
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TALKING HEADS JDSU’s Sue Spradley explains why virtualisation requires a new approach – both for CSPs and the vendors that support their transformations
Sue Spradley
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ORCHESTRATION Kate O’Flaherty points out that a virtualised network is useless on it’s own. It needs the structure provided by orchestration
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EXPERT OPINION NFV requires the right implementation in order for CSPs to realize the benefits to the full, writes Guy Daley
ORCHESTRATION C12
CAPACITY PLANNING Dr Jay Perrett highlights the issue of how CSPs can deliver the best SDN experience
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EXPERT OPINION Network and service enablement tools will need to transform for NFV, writes Ronnie Neil
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TA L K I N G
H E A D S
For CSPs it’s time to change – or be changed Virtualisation requires a new approach – both for CSPs and for the vendors that support their transformations Sue Spradley is vice president and general manager of the Network and Service Enablement (NSE) business at JDSU. She joined the company in January, 2013 as leader for NSE global product line management with responsibility for all NSE businesses. These encompass broadband networking, mobility, network visibility and control, and cloud and data centre offerings. Previously, Spradley was president of the North America region and executive board member of the Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) joint venture. Prior to NSN, Spradley was a senior executive at network equipment vendor Nortel, during which she served many roles including sales, global services and operations, with responsibility for services for enterprises and carriers, as well as for supply chain and manufacturing. As president for Nortel’s global product line management and North American sales, she restored profitability to the $2 billion business unit. As vice president for customer service and operations for wireless networks, she successfully led a team providing field-based project management, engineering, design, implementation and support for North American tier one accounts. Spradley currently serves as chair for US Ignite and ATIS, and previously served on the board of directors for Exfo, and was a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee reporting to the President of the United States. As JDSU plans to spin-off its NSE unit into a new company to better meet the needs of communications service providers as they migrate to virtualised and cloud-based technologies, she tells VanillaPlus that CSPs need to make sure they have the right test and assurance capabilities to support NFV deployments including the ability to support the NFV orchestrator in requesting good network configuration and reconfiguration.
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anillaPlus: What does JDSU view as being critical to the business success of virtualised networks and services?
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The second enablement activity I’d emphasise is the ability for the NFV orchestrator to request good network configuration and re-configuration decisions. It is fine to confirm that the NFV environment can
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Sue Spradley: While not under-estimating the challenges involved in implementing the basic virtualisation infrastructure and functions, I would highlight two key enablement activities for communications service providers (CSPs) to focus on. The first is to ensure they have the ability to provide appropriate test and assurance functions in the NFV environment. Virtualised networks will require at least the same level of testing and assurance visibility as physical networks require, if not more. CSPs will not be prepared to release NFV network capacity into
commercial service without having the ability to conduct pre-release testing and monitor and troubleshoot the network when in operation. However, most of today’s test and assurance solutions are not capable of operating in a virtualised environment, so availability of test and assurance solutions that can be used within an NFV network will be a key gating factor in the commercial launch of virtualised networks and services. The good news is that the technology is now becoming available.
VANILLAPLUS NFV SUPPLEMENT I DECEMBER 2014 / JANUARY 2015
“ ” JDSU provides solutions that cover the whole lifecycle of networks and services, and this will continue in the era of virtualised environments
effectively implement network configurations, but if the proposed decisions do not deliver either a better Quality of Experience (QoE) for subscribers, and/or lower operating costs, then the NFV network will not deliver the expected business enhancing results. So a second critical factor will be the provision of the appropriate analytics – supported by the collection of the appropriate data – to enable the orchestrator to propose ‘good’ configuration decisions. We believe that JDSU solutions will play a key role in delivering on both the above critical factors.
VP: What role will JDSU Network & Service Enablement (NSE) solutions fulfill in a virtualised environment and how does this differ from their role in traditional physical networks? SS: JDSU provides solutions that cover the whole lifecycle of networks and services, and this will continue in the era of virtualised environments. Specifically for a CSP, JDSU solutions will provide performance testing of network capacity and services before these are released into service. In addition JDSU will provide monitoring and trouble-shooting of the network and services while they are in commercial operation. To do this, our solutions will obviously have to be able to operate in a virtualised environment, including the ability to insert and access traffic at virtual network interfaces. However, compared to their use in physical networks, there is another very significant difference – in virtualised networks our test and assurance solutions need to be able to configure and execute their functions automatically and in real-time.
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When an NFV network reconfiguration is requested, our solutions must be able to automatically test the new configuration and immediately start monitoring this new configuration
Sue Spradley, vice president and general manager of the Network and Service Enablement (NSE) business at JDSU
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TA L K I N G
H E A D S
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Splitting JDSU in two will obviously provide both new companies with an increased focus on their respective target markets
when it is released. What this means is that our solutions become part of the operational equipment – a substantial change. VP: We’ve heard that JDSU is involved in a virtualisation-related TM Forum Catalyst Project. What does that involve? SS: As you may know, every TM Forum catalyst project is sponsored by a service provider and AT&T is the sponsor of this project. The project name is ‘Business-Agile NFV Orchestration’ and the project objective is to illustrate how service providers need to harness appropriate analytics and dynamically defined policies to optimise the business value delivered by NFV orchestration. In this sense, it is a confirmation of the critical success factor of the ability for the NFV orchestrator to request good network configuration and re-configuration decisions that I described above. In addition to AT&T, the other companies involved in the project are JDSU, Microsoft and Ericsson. The project outline was described at the TM Forum Digital Disruption event in December 2014 and the main demonstration is planned for the TM Forum World event in June 2015 in Nice, France. VP: Can you summarise why JDSU believes it is the right NSE partner for CSPs planning to introduce virtualised networks and services? SS: There are two main reasons why we believe that JDSU is an optimum partner for CSPs planning to introduce virtualised networks and services – the readiness of our solutions to support NFV environments and the NFV domain expertise and experience provided by our staff. The latter factor is in many ways a direct consequence of the first, since the industry-leading readiness of our solutions to support virtualised environments has enabled our staff to proactively participate in early NFV trials and industry forums.
www.jdsu.com/NFV
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Let me give you some examples of both these factors. We recently launched a virtualised version of TrueSpeed, our leading RFC 6349 based TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) throughput test
solution. The traffic analysis agents within our xSIGHT Customer Experience Assurance solution are software-only agents that we have already deployed in virtualised form in early NFV proof of concept trials. As well as engaging with CSPs in some of the earliest NFV trials, our staff are actively involved in key NFV industry forums, including the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) and the TM Forum ZOOM (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management) programme. I talked before about our involvement in a TM Forum NFV catalyst project, but a network equipment ‘NFV Maturity Model’ proposed by JDSU is expected to be adopted shortly within the ZOOM programme. So, in summary, it is the combination of our solutions and our people that make JDSU an ideal NFV enablement partner. VP: We saw the recent announcement that JDSU will soon split into two companies. How will this split generally impact your plans to address virtualized environments? SS: Splitting JDSU in two will obviously provide both new companies with an increased focus on their respective target markets. In NewCo, the interim name for the NSE spin-off, we are also transforming the culture and strategy of our company. In particular, we plan to become much more agile in our execution – the rate of change in communications has become much faster over recent years and this new business environment will require companies able to execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability. We plan to be such a company. As our CSP customers around the world are reengineering their networks around the cloud, involving new technologies such as NFV, SDN and Cloud RANs, we in NewCo will pursue a cloud-centric test and assurance strategy to meet their evolving needs. JDSU is the number one network and service enablement company today and we intend to ensure that the new company will retain that industry leadership position in this brave new cloud-based world.
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O R C H E S T R AT I O N
Orchestration is the management enabler for NFV NFV allows CSPs to increase efficiency and lower costs, but it requires a transformation in the way networks are run, writes Kate O’Flaherty
virtualised network is useless on its own: it needs the structure provided by orchestration. But NFV (network functions virtualisation) orchestration requires a radically different approach to traditional CSP network management. This is seeing network and IT departments converge in order to meet evolving data and analytics needs.
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It is not a simple transition, but the benefits of NFV orchestration are worth the complexity. Like cloud, NFV is easy to scale, removing the risk of service unavailability due to capacity shortage. Therefore CSPs do not have to provision large, spare capacities; this can instead be allocated on demand. Orchestration frees up capacity, which can then be used for other services, by mapping the instantiation of virtual network functions against real-time demand, says Joachim Mason, head of data centre, UK and
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In the NFV environment, network equipment is no longer dedicated hardware and instead comprises servers and switches. The technology therefore needs to use the capabilities developed in cloud computing, such as automated provisioning of compute and
storage, automation of network provisioning and service chaining in the data centre.
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Ireland at Cisco Systems: "CSPs can also achieve a more predictable and optimised return on investment by deploying additional network services without unnecessary equipment costs."
Joachim Mason: Orchestration frees up capacity which can then be used for other services
When used in the right way, virtual tools can be configured to perform any network function, says Ronnie Neil, customer experience assurance product marketing manager at JDSU. "We can quickly introduce capacity when required or launch a new service. This adds efficiency, as well as lowering cost and increasing agility in terms of doing things faster." According to Shaul Rozen, director of product strategy at Amdocs, orchestration is "the brain of the new network". He says: "Think about what would happen if you just virtualised the network and did not orchestrate it: the end point would be just the network, but virtualised - which is no good."
Orchestration challenge
Ronnie Neil: Used in the right way, virtual tools can be configured to perform any network function
However, orchestration faces multiple challenges. Services are not currently joined up and sit across multiple vendors and standards. Rozen says: "One of the key challenges is creating an ecosystem that can be applied and certified on top of orchestration. Another is the current lack of standards: different vendors offer varying templates depending on their own functions and capabilities." There is also a lack of definition of what a virtual network manager should do, says Rozen. On top of this, no decision has been made on how many orchestrators are needed and whether there should be a hierarchy such as global and local variants of the function.
Shaul Rozen: Orchestration is the brain of the new network. Without out it you just have a virtualised network
Appropriate data and analytics is essential for making configuration decisions. According to Rozen, there are three types of analytics needed for smart orchestration: network analytics to deal with congestion and predict traffic flows; compute power to assess availability of resources around data centres; and customer analytics to use information for better business decisions when orchestrating. For example, Rozen says: "If you need to prioritise one of two services, one way to go about it is to look at customers that are high value or pay more."
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Without the right tools, operators do not have transparency and control over a distributed NFV platform, says Andreas Lemke, the senior marketing manager for cloud at Alcatel-Lucent. "With NFV analytics, service providers can detect potential issues before they become critical. For example, by observing resource utilisation trends, an NFV platform can raise alarms and take proactive measures to avoid bottlenecks."
IT transformation The technology is proving increasingly beneficial, but in order to take advantage, CSPs must transform the way they are structured. Whereas within traditional CSPs, operations runs the network and IT handles the infrastructure, a virtualised environment requires the two departments to work together. IT departments are usually the pioneers of using virtualisation, so are in an ideal position to assist, Rozen points out. "There is a need to shift skills: IT capabilities need to be transferred into network teams – and there should be a leakage of personnel between those two departments." Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research's networking practice agrees, saying: "Successful NFV solutions are a blend of IT and network competences. Neither can succeed without the other." This, combined with other issues, means NFV deployments will take time. Due to a lack of standards and the state of the technology, it will still be at least five years before NFV is in action. In the meantime, many CSPs are looking at a phased approach to deployments, says Neil. "They don't expect to have whole networks virtualised. It will come in stages with the simplest parts first. For example, let's implement virtualisation for a single network element." As the 'brain' of the network, there is no doubt that orchestration is integral to NFV's success. However, the scale of transformation should not be underestimated. As Neil points out: "If you compare the introduction of virtualisation to 2G, going to 3G, to 4G, it is an order of magnitude bigger. It's a dramatic change."
VANILLAPLUS NFV SUPPLEMENT I DECEMBER 2014 / JANUARY 2015
THE GLOBAL VOICE OF B/OSS PRESENTS
ROUND TABLE:
NFV Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is an elegant concept that understandably has gained a lot of CSP attention. Join us for an in-depth guide to NFV with specialists and analysts who can deliver the answers. The Panellists: Glen Ragoonanan, lead analyst for Analysys Mason's Infrastructure Solutions, Service Delivery Platforms and Software-Controlled Networking research programmes Ken Dilbeck, NFV catalyst lead - TM Forum Sameh Yamany, CTO and VP of Mobile Assurance & Analytics - JDSU Tom Conklin, Consulting Managing Director – Cloud / NFV - Ericsson Guy Daley, Director and CTO of Product Management - Cisco Rob Marson, VP Marketing - Nakina Systems George Malim, editor - VanillaPlus
Wednesday 21st January, 2015 4pm-6pm GMT vanillaplus.com
Panellists
NFV orchestration must be capable of managing and sustaining virtualised critical infrastructure As with any new technology, NFV requires the right implementation in order for CSPs to realize the benefits to the full, writes Guy Daley
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he goal of network functions virtualisation (NFV) is to migrate, where it makes sense, the network functions away from specialised architectures to an environment that allows these network services to be supported on industry standard servers and storage, and managed using IT oriented virtualisation technology. In doing so, the CSP’s agility increases since network services can be dynamically placed, instantiated, or moved across various locations in the network as required, without the need for installation of purpose built appliances.
consist of a set of VNFs, standard NFs or a combination of both. Service chains can vary from simple to very complex. An example of a simple chain is a firewall and a load balancer sitting in front of a number of DNS servers. A complex service chain might be the service infrastructure sitting behind a mobile gateway device. Service chains can be built using a variety of techniques ranging from virtually connecting NFs and VNFs together and routing traffic through them, or placing metadata in the user packet, which is used to steer traffic through the VNFs.
Implementation considerations First, the operational model needs to adapt from the current model, which supports physical network entities, to a model supporting virtual network entities. Today, an NF (network function) is generally associated with a discrete piece of hardware. This makes an NF easy to identify and determine its current state based on physical indicators. With the move to a virtualised environment, these simple assumptions change dramatically. VNFs (virtual network functions) execute on virtual machines (VMs) that may be distributed over a number of servers, making neither them easily identified nor the physical indicators used to determine status of physical equipment.
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In addition, VNFs may be scaled up based on the network load. In some instances, altering the resources associated with the VNF will do this. In other cases it may involve altering the number of VNFs performing the function and as a result VNFs may appear and disappear from the network topology based on load. Moreover, these VNFs may form part of a CSPs critical infrastructure.
Service chaining Another frequent requirement of NFV is service chaining. A service chain steers traffic through a set of functions in a pre-set order. With NFV, a network service may be composed of such chains and may
NFV orchestration The management of virtual network environments requires orchestration. This sets it apart from the management of traditional CSP networks. NFV will need to use and adapt many of the capabilities developed in the cloud-computing arena, such as automated provisioning of compute and storage, automation of the network provisioning and service chaining in the data centre. Examples of orchestration adapted for NFV use include: • Rapid configuration, provisioning and chaining of virtual network functions and other resources required for a given service. • Intelligent service placement. A CSP may have a variety of small and medium-sized data centres or dispersed equipment racks that can house server hardware. This may provide the opportunity to physically place the VNFs where they will be least costly, yet most effective in meeting the service
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Service chains can be built using a variety of techniques ranging from virtually connecting NFs and VNFs together and routing traffic through them
All these new demands mean we need new functionality in network management solutions and changes in operational procedures supported by an orchestration system capable of building the virtual environment, provisioning service chains, loading and configuring the VNFs, and monitoring their health and that of their underlying virtual infrastructure.
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requirement. A VNF can be placed anywhere in the network, at the data centre, at a network node, or even close to the customer premises. • Dynamic and elastic scaling of services. A VNF is allocated physical and virtual resources only when needed, impacting CSP capex and opex. CSPs can also achieve a more predictable and optimised return-on-investment (ROI) by deploying additional network services without unnecessary equipment costs. This is especially beneficial for service providers with limited subscriber populations faced with having to add hardware that may significantly exceed the foreseeable demand in services. • Full lifecycle management of the VNFs. This includes the creation, instantiation, and monitoring of the VNF until it is decommissioned.
Cisco’s approach to NFV management and orchestration Cisco provides CSPs with open and flexible solutions bringing together the functionalities required for resource orchestration and network control. It also provides CSPs the ability to transition towards virtualisation at their own pace through solutions that seamlessly support both physical and virtual service components. The key characteristics of the solution are: • An orchestration architecture capable of addressing the spectrum of CSP NFV requirements • Hypervisor and virtual machine manager agnostic • Software solution that is independent of underlying hardware providing ability to blend current physical capabilities with new virtual service components to create rich service offerings. • A modular architecture leveraging open interfaces and open source software where pertinent • Flexibility to support the rapid on-boarding of new services through configuration and customisation rather than development • Extensible architecture enabling rapid integration of third party infrastructure, services and capabilities • Ability to scale up or down to address both value services and volume services • Ability to provide SLA guarantees through real-time network aware service admission and placement
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• Open standard APIs northbound and southbound, facilitating integration into existing OSS/BSS environments Cisco solutions enable and supports the workflow to model the CSP business processes seamlessly. An important benefit resulting from the orchestration system’s characteristics is that it makes both virtual and physical network infrastructure easy to use, thus allowing for a transformation at the business management layer, where customers can interact with the technical catalogue of network services via APIs or GUIs for service creation, composition, and development.
The author, Guy Daley, is director of product management, Chief Technology and Architecture Office at Cisco Systems
Orchestration is fundamental to the delivery of complex services based on composite VNFs. The architecture allows a user to specify the network rules and policies for interconnecting service VNFs in a service chain and to connect these service chains to the service provider WAN. These tenant-specific service chains need to be highly available and the and solution provides the rules for creating dynamic service chains and load balancing traffic between multiple instances of VNFs in a service chain. For CSPs, the solution must be capable of managing and sustaining virtualised critical infrastructure such as mobile voice and packet services. Cisco provides this capability. In addition, the solution is very comprehensive, addressing the needs of delivering elastic and dynamic cloud-based services with a guaranteed SLA in a CSP environment. It breaks down the major challenges into logical modules and provides an open standards-based approach to orchestration at each of its layers. Cisco solutions for NFV management and orchestration can provide significant benefits to the service providers in opex and capex savings by enabling a transformational opportunity created by greater operational agility of the network. CSPs can achieve faster innovation rates that can lead to addressing new business models and opportunities at lower risk through a more agile operation of their core assets.
www.ciscosystems.com
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C A PA C I T Y
P L A N N I N G
The demand for virtualisation exists but how will CSPs deliver best practice? As the demand for true network virtualisation is about to be met, a key issue is how CSPs can deliver the best SDN experience. The importance of capacity planning, management and orchestration is now being recognised in the journey towards end-to-end virtualisation, writes Dr Jay Perrett
S The author, Dr Jay Perrett, is chief technology officer of Aria Networks.
imilarly to software defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualisation (NFV) is one of the most established components of network virtualisation. Network virtualisation provides CSPs with the opportunity to derive more value from operational and planned network and data centre assets. This is achieved when deployment and redeployment of network assets and functionality to meet demand takes place through machine rather than human control. Virtualisation has become essential if new and emerging business models, which are more data intensive than ever before, are to be effectively supported.
reconfigured dynamically without constraints of geography or hardware. NFV and SDN provide a unique opportunity to bring IT and telecoms capacity planning together. Historically, IT and telecoms capacity planning functions have existed in very separate silos, using their own processes and methodologies. With NFV, the consolidation of IT and telecoms capacity management functions is needed to match overall capacity and business demands, as well as to be able to obtain true end-to-end visibility of the networking real estate.
Capacity planning
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From a capacity management perspective, if the transition to a virtualised network is to be realized, three key requirements must be addressed. First, a generic representation of the network must be developed that can be instantiated for the technology mix under consideration or operation. A data driven representation of capacity will also need to be created, so a clear definition can be described in reusable templates. Finally, there must be a flexible way to create a process flow.
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Two different industries, each with a language of their own, are facing the challenges of network virtualisation from two different angles. The first is the data centre community, which has been moving toward reusable assets in the data centre to provide virtual machines to users that can rapidly be configured. The second is the CSPs, which need to provide new services and functions dynamically and to an aggressive timescale. Both have the same objective: to be able to deliver a virtual network that can be configured and
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Capacity management is only one aspect of a managed virtual network, but it is an important requirement in the orchestrator layer. Adaptability is the key facet of a virtualised network. What this means from a capacity management perspective is the ability to respond to changes in network infrastructure. To remain competitive, the network needs to be abstracted from the technology – the network is simply a vehicle for the support of services and applications and thus revenue. With this approach it becomes simpler to configure and rapidly reconfigure the network model simply by changing the data required to model it. This delivers a software defined network. The second key requirement, that a data driven definition of capacity facilitating a more detailed level of control, is required to effectively manage capacity on a rapidly reconfiguring network. The capacity definition and capacity requirements need to be data driven also. This has been achieved in the past through traditional intelligent networks, where service function was built from smaller building blocks, but the equipment those services ran on was still bespoke. The definition of capacity also needs to be abstracted from the equipment, which is essentially what NFV enables by abstracting the network function from the physical equipment. Once capacity has been abstracted, services or applications can then utilise the capacity they require without being constrained by how.
Orchestration In a network the orchestration layer is performing the role of network operating system. It is responsible for separating the infrastructure from the applications by providing a standard application programming interface (API) to the applications in one direction and to the network in the other.
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Vendors who provide management and orchestrator functionality for services and applications will need to model networks in a different way. Specifically they will need to consider a data driven definition of both the network and capacity. The former is really an SDN enabler. Once networks can be defined simply by data, any network architecture can be modelled or tweaked in real-time. How the network functionality changes is a defined by the second requirement, the NFV enabler. Capacity management and orchestration are front and centre of the evolution to a true service enabled virtual network constructed on the principles of NFV and SDN. Network operators need to effectively orchestrate capacity to derive the best possible value from infrastructure assets to deliver the most effective capacity management. Central to this objective is effectively understanding the current and future demands on a network and enabling it to optimise itself in real time to deliver to those demands. If CSPs are to remain competitive in an environment with eroding margins and rising service quality expectations, the virtualised network route with a SDN supported by NFV really is the only option. Whilst the technology and business drivers to achieve this already exist, two very different network communities need to converge on a single view of the virtualised network.
Capacity management and orchestration are front and centre of the evolution to a true service enabled virtual network constructed on the principles of NFV and SDN
A new approach is needed. An approach that thinks of networks, capacities and consumption as enablers to the provision of services and applications to a population of consumers who rarely consider the network between them and their content and who also do not expect to pay much for it. In this environment, understanding the cost of delivering capacity, maximising capacity from current network assets and having a clear and transparent return on investment route from network investment are essential elements to delivering profitability.
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Network and service enablement tools will need to transform for NFV In part one of the VanillaPlus Guide to NFV, Ronnie Neil discussed the ways in which NFV will profoundly change how communication networks operate, unlocking dramatic, new operational efficiencies and service-delivery benefits. He also highlighted the need to significantly transform network-associated OSS and BSS tools, including integrating them with NFV infrastructure to fully realize the benefits of virtualisation. Here, he takes a deeper look at how network and service enablement tools will need to transform The author, Ronnie Neil, is a strategic marketing manager for Mobile Assurance and Analytics at JDSU
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NFV challenges for network and service enablement tools Four key functionality changes will be required to let the enablement tools mentioned above operate effectively in NFV environments. • Ability to connect to virtual interfaces Traditionally, enablement tools connect to physical interface points to insert and/or access
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wo important network and service enablement functions are considered vital to providing high customer quality of experience: Ethernet service activation tests and customer experience assurance, which detects and diagnoses customer-impacting faults. With the greater complexity of the NFV world, network operators will require even higher levels of insight and performance from such test and assurance functions.
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network traffic. In an NFV environment, most – if not all – of the required interfaces will be located in a virtual machine inside a single physical server. An enablement tool will therefore need to operate within the virtual machines, with virtual agents able to inject and/or access network traffic. • Ability to collect network configuration information from an NFV orchestration function The ability to connect to virtual interface points is of limited use if the tool does not know which interfaces to connect to. To learn this, an enablement tool will need to connect to an NFV orchestration function via a virtual network function (VNF) manager. With appropriate information from an orchestrator, an enablement tool will know which virtual interfaces are which network interface points – for example, a 3G Gn or LTE S1-MME interface. • Ability to re-configure and execute enablement functions very quickly Once an enablement tool knows what interfaces to connect to, it must be able to configure itself and start executing the test or assurance functions very quickly. Lateness will mean that the re-configured network is either delayed to being released to live operation or is operating with no assurance monitoring and troubleshooting functions. • Ability to feed test and analysis results to the NFV policy control function To ensure that NFV network configuration decisions are good business decisions, test and analysis results need to be fed back into the NFV policy control function. This function will then use the results along with other data to formulate configuration decisions and forward these to the NFV orchestrator for implementation. To be effective, this feedback loop must happen in real time.
Standalone enablement tools to operational equipment In addition to the four functionality challenges described above, NFV introduces two fundamental operational differences for network and service enablement tools: • The tools must operate autonomously. They must, without manual intervention, configure themselves, execute their functions, and forward results to appropriate applications. • The tools must become part of the operational equipment. They interface with the NFV orchestrator to receive network configuration information and they supply information back to the NFV policy control unit.
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These are major changes for enablement tools with consequences reaching beyond the complex technical aspects to include, for example, tool selfmanagement, reliability and selling-model implications.
Industry recognition of enablement tool importance The industry has been working on standards and guidelines for NFV networks for some years now. As one would expect, the initial focus of this work was on the practical implementation of the virtualisation functions. Recently, however, the scope of the research has expanded to cover associated aspects of operating an NFV network such as how to make good business decisions and the role and requirements of enablement tools.
Once an enablement tool knows what interfaces to connect to, it must be able to configure itself and start executing the test or assurance functions very quickly
Two leading industry forums involved in this research are the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) and the TM Forum Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) programme. As an example of this broader focus, consider the Business-Agile NFV Orchestration project currently in progress within the TM Forum. The project objective is to illustrate how NFV network operators need to harness appropriate analytics and dynamically defined policies to optimise the business value delivered by NFV orchestration decisions. The project is sponsored by AT&T and ecosystem participants include JDSU (supplying real-time data collection and mediation), Ericsson (supplying policy analytics and service orchestration) and Microsoft (supplying NFV orchestration). It is still relatively early in the development and deployment of NFV networks, but a significant amount of research, standardisation, and trialling has already been conducted. However, more research is required. Critical to this work will be guidelines and standards that relate to the transformation that enablement tools must make to effectively support the introduction of business-successful NFV networks. This transformation has already begun, as evidenced by the introduction of new enablement tools with the capabilities to operate in NFV virtualised environments. For example, a virtualied version of the JDSU RFC 6349-compliant TrueSpeed TCP throughput test solution (TrueSpeed VNF) was recently introduced, and the JDSU xSIGHT customer experience assurance solution has data collection agents proven to operate with virtual network interfaces. This latter solution has demonstrated the ability to monitor traffic, in real-time, in a virtualised environment in two trials with tier-one communications service providers (CSPs). The enablement tools required to successfully introduce and operate NFV networks are on their way.
www.jdsu.com/nfv
C15
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