Ciena's Software-Architected Network

With this comprehensive network view at hand, the NOC personnel rapidly can configure an enhanced Ethernet service such as PBB-TE, including service parameters such as quality of service, protection mechanisms and SLA variables through a unified single-touch GUI, which automatically provisions the service end-to-end through the network.

Comprehensive Multiservice Management from the NOC

A unified management model simplifies the control of an increasing set of network elements, technologies and service types. From a common GUI, key building blocks of advanced services, such as reconfigurable optical wavelengths, sub-wavelength capacity, OTN timeslots and Ethernet packet transport tunnels and services, all can be monitored and controlled with efficient mechanisms for service activation, fault isolation and service management.

Manual data entry provisioning models must be modernized if service providers expect to keep up with the demand for new services. Service providers should look to the newer tools such as O-UNI, ASON, GMPLS signaling and control plane technologies to automate these processes. An automatic re-provisioning control plane with mesh restoration also ensures the network is protected against multiple faults with minimized, shared protection capacity.

Through multilayer service management tools, NOC personnel are able to rapidly isolate network faults, determine the root cause and identify the affected end-customer services, thereby minimizing customer outages, shortening mean-time-to-repair and ensuring fulfillment of SLAs. This helps to accelerate new revenue-generating services and minimize operational expenditure by leveraging the current knowledge base of the NOC personnel and the already deployed integration into critical back-office systems.

Furthermore, many of the management tools used in today’s NOCs are focused on the network elements or the network as a whole, but few manage at the service level. With service-aware NOC monitoring systems, the service provider can protect their most valuable asset — their customer base. In a service-aware system that correlates network elements and topology to actual services, the NOC personnel can know immediately how any network outage affects their customers. Also through proactive root-cause analysis, the point of failure can be identified quickly and fixed.

The correlation of network elements and topology to services is not only useful when putting out the fires, but also valuable during scheduled maintenance planning. By having a GUI that clearly maps customer services to network elements and fiber spans, appropriate actions can take place to temporarily re-provision services around a maintenance point.

In addition, as customers’ service requirements evolve from simple pipes to intelligent managed services, they are demanding additional information from the service provider. This includes service-level validation as well as self-service control for bandwidth on demand. These educated customers also want validation that they are getting what they are paying for, which can be satisfied through Web-accessible monthly reports of the health, status and key performance metrics of the end-to-end service. These reports are used to validate that the network is meeting the agreed-upon SLAs.

The need for speed is not dwindling. The velocity by which services are provisioned is paramount in today’s highly connected world. The only way service providers will be able to maintain and keep pace with demand is by deploying flexible, low-touch and programmable next-generation software systems — both in the NOC and as key features of network elements. Only by unifying the myriad of processes inherent in service creation and delivery under the umbrella of service-level management will service providers be able to deliver the value required by today’s demanding and educated customers.

Theresa Cauble is director of software strategy at Ciena Corp., which provides flexible platforms, intelligent software and professional services to build converged networks for enhanced services and applications.

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