Ciena's Software-Architected Network

Furthermore, in the past once the service finally was set up, service providers had minimal visibility into the end-to-end performance of their network and/or the services riding on it, limiting the ability to offer stringent and meaningful SLAs. In addition, there was a lack of visibility across the network layers, which encumbered troubleshooting during service outages, adversely affected performance metrics tied to time-to-repair and jeopardized adherence to service availability SLAs.

This traditional service deployment model is insufficient in meeting today’s network service demands. A new type of network is required — one that can be re-adjusted rapidly to satisfy changing customer demands with just-in-time network reconfiguration and end-to-end monitoring of service-specific SLAs.

Network Flexibility through Automation and Intelligence

In order to meet these evolving service demands, networks must become more dynamic and software-defined, with:

• Increased service awareness in access and metro networks to enable new service creation, stratification, activation and assurance
• The ability to dynamically allocate, increase and/or decrease network capacity with zero-to-low-touch via programmability to respond to unpredictable demand curves
• Optimization of infrastructure across wireless and wireline networks for ubiquitous connectivity and seamless service delivery
• Integrated and advanced service-aware data, control and management plane features from the customer edge to the service provider core

Using a software-defined network architecture requires minimal initial configuration of equipment, which improves service deployment cycle times and efficiency. As each network element comes online, it automatically connects to the control plane, discovering its neighbors and the overall network topology. The configuration of newly added network elements then is disseminated automatically to all of the other participating network elements through the control plane.

With intelligent network elements, the NOC automatically is kept up-to-date with network modifications as they occur. These changes include the addition and deletion of network elements, network links and subcomponents (i.e., cards, SFPs, fans, etc.) Using this intelligent approach, the database of record is the network itself. There is no chance of user data-entry errors proliferating through the NOC since it is kept in sync with the network through autonomous messages, therefore maintaining a constant accurate view of the network that it is managing.

This is a key advantage over today’s error-prone and labor-intensive manual data entry of the active inventory and topology. In fact, a recent report by networking industry consulting firm Network Strategy Partners revealed that the deployment of intelligent network elements and control planes has been shown to save a service provider more than 40 percent of its annual network operational expenditure because minimal human intervention is required to provision and manage end-to-end services.

Using an intelligent control plane and proficient network management tools, NOC personnel are given a view into their live network that previously was missing. This accurate view of network topology and available resources is a critical component in service creation, proactive alarm correlation and SLA monitoring and verification. In addition, an accurate view of the live network resource consumption can be used for precise connection admission control as well as network growth trend analysis and proactive and targeted network expansion or upgrade plans.