Ray Mota Talks NFV with Affirmed Networks & RCR Wireless

This CEO panel, filmed during Mobile World Congress 2016, brings together Hassan Ahmed, Affirmed Networks CEO, ACG Research CEO Ray Mota and Jeff Mucci, CEO of RCR Wireless News. The group discusses the use cases driving carrier NFV adoption and how the NFV landscape has changed in the past year.

Contact info@acgcc.com for more information about ACG's video services. 

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Juniper Analyst Day Report

Juniper Networks’ full commitment to virtualization of the network was clear at the NXTWORK 2015. Juniper introduced Cloud CPE, a fully automated end-to-end NFV solution to enable its customers to implement a smooth migration strategy for their existing purpose-built networks to a virtualized, more efficient infrastructure. 

Key Findings

• Juniper’s Cloud CPE solution includes Contrail Service Orchestration, an important feature for both service creation and automation, that can greatly benefit their customers to gain competitive advantage in service introduction with faster time to market.

• Juniper’s Cloud CPE solution is the first of many NFV use cases that blends both physical and virtual network services together to simplify the service creation process and automate the entire service delivery process.

• Junos disaggregation is a good move by Juniper to decouple its software and hardware and place more value on Junos rather it hardware.

• Juniper’s competitors are also working on similar solutions. Juniper’s professional services becomes a major team to ensure its customer can roll out their virtualized infrastructure in a predictable time frame.

Click to download the Market Impact.

Click for more information about ACG’s business case analysis services or contact sales@acgcc.com.

 
         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

ACG Research Talks Capex and Opex Challenges for NFV and SDN Deployments

ACG's Robert Haim business case analyst, talks with RCR Wireless News about  the telecom industry continues push towards increased reliance on software solutions using virtualization technologies such as network functions virtualization, software-defined networking and cloud platforms, questions surrounding the financial implications of the move remain.

Robert discusses a recent ACG report that shines a more critical light on the financial implications of NFV, SDN and cloud deployments. Haim talks about how telecom operators should view the capex/opex trade off in terms of NFV/SDN deployments; the importance of service innovation gains in terms of the view on costs associated with virtualization platform deployments; and the potential impact “double opex” cost issue might have on how telecom operators approach their NFV and SDN plans.

Click to read more and listen to Robert's interview.

Click for more information about ACG’s business case analysis services or contact information@acgcc.com.

 
         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

Regardless of Technology, SPs’ Requirement Fundamentals Don’t Change

A basic tenet for infrastructure deployment for service providers and operators is to avoid introducing any platform, system or software that could potentially destabilize their network operation. For a consistent and smooth network operation, service providers demand platforms that offer 99.999 percent availability for a down time of no longer than five minutes per year. It has been demonstrated that network outages that last 10 minutes to several hours can and will have a direct negative impact on a service provider’s business. The cost of long down times can be quantified by SLA penalty clauses, as well as to an inherent opportunity cost in terms of higher customer churn rate and a poor image in the industry.

NFV and Virtualized Network Functions have complicated this issue further. While the promise of a lower TCO is naturally tempting, service providers’ fundamentals in their requirements do not change. VNF or not, they demand carrier-grade, highly available (5 9s or better) systems to ensure that mission-critical applications are protected.

Techniques to ensure high availability there should be redundancy at the network (a shadow network), system (for example, a backup router), hardware (for example, a backup control plane card), processors or other chips. For an NFV based solution, any virtualized function that happens to perform network- and application-critical functions must also offer 5 9s availability.

Examples are:

1. Network protocols that handle the control planes (routing, signaling)

2. Network services (application delivery controllers, for example, DPI, CDN, firewall, load balancers)

3. Packet core SGSN-MME, S/P gateways

4. Subscriber/Business connectivity (PPP, DHCP, GTP connections and tunnels)

The advantage of SDN/VNF based software is in its capability to scale out programmatically based on a priori set of rules. However, to ensure that a connection is not lost or the network does not have to go through a major re-convergence of resources, for example, routes, the time frame for scale out must be of O (milliseconds). This could be challenging to address via scale-outs only. It is better to assign virtual machines that back up critical parts of the network operation. The VMs must reside on a different board and preferably on different servers to protect the network from software crashes that could bring a board or the entire system down. Naturally, the active VM and the stateful backup VM will communicate via some sort of “hello” protocol to be aware of each other’s state, and share updated database of resources, for example, routing tables. The backup VM could be a standby or preferably an active one for load balancing. Of course, an efficient design would include only those software entities that need protection and are afforded a separate backup VM. For example, the control plane of a router needs 1+1 backup whereas the forwarding plane can afford an N+1 backup scheme.

ETSI NFV Expert Group on Availability and Resiliency stipulated its requirement in its specification: [paraphrasing] Single point of failures for the VNFs must be prevented by deployment of “independent” NFVI domains. The implementation of NFV should consider a geographically redundant deployment to introduce high availability to VNFs.

Vendors have followed this directive, and there are some novel and viable approaches that can implement it. Two examples are Wind River’s Titanium server, which introduces both hardware redundancy and software resiliency to the VNF that run on it. Another novel approach has been taken by Stratus Computers with its Software Defined Availability, which moves downtime prevention and recovery from the hardware or the OS to an “automated” software layer. When a failure occurs, a previously paired VM is brought back up, leveraging the cloud to run the application under protection. Stratus claims that with their SDA “any application with any availability need can be run in the cloud with application transparency.” The novel design stems from the company’s claim that no application code changes are required to benefit from SDA. Pairs of VMs are created between servers and the state of VMs is captured regularly and asynchronously, offering a stateful operational mode.

Clearly, the industry is on the right track for ensuring protection of VNFs that need it. The approach that is taken by vendors can be leveraged as a competitive advantage if they can demonstrate 5 9s simultaneously with efficient use of resources.

Click for more information about Robert Haim.


         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

Business Case for a Common NFV Platform

The potential of NFV to improve service agility and reduce total cost of ownership requires an approach that allocates hardware, software, and human resources to meet the requirements for all services in an on-demand approach. ACG Research has written a whitepaper, sponsored by VMWare and Affirmed Networks, that explores two emerging models of NFV deployment: 1) custom software stacks that aim to integrate as much of the model as possible into a single solution by a vendor and 2) a modular approach based on the deployment of a common virtualization platform where multiple VNFs and other NFV components are provided independently. The analysis evaluates each approach by comparing its TCO to the TCO of the traditional (appliance-based) approach where all approaches are serving identical functional requirements demand. The analysis determines that only one of these approaches will result in sustainable benefits to the operator.

Download ACG’s Business Case for a Common NFV Platform.

To read more about NFV click here.

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

SDN/NFV: Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold?

Another gold rush has brought a high level of excitement to the network infrastructure producers and consumers alike. The mad dash to SDN/NFV feels like déjà vu, for example, mid 1990s for ATM and late 1990s for MPLS. See Paul Parker Johnson’s “How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then).” There are huge expectations from all stakeholders to offer and implement infrastructures that reduce both capital and operational expenditures, in addition to opening new doors for rapid deployment of innovative and lucrative business services.

Intuitively, the SDN/NFV combination should reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), both capex (COTS versus purpose-built hardware) and opex (cost of provisioning and network maintenance). In evaluating TCO, there are other costs that could favor one approach versus the other.

Most often, capex savings are only discussed in terms of COTS hardware versus physical or purpose-built hardware. Basically, capex includes any upfront nonrecurring cost; that includes the cost of “network roll-out” (NRO), which is the cost of integration, testing and verification of the incremental hardware into the existing infrastructure. Unlike the cost of hardware, this cost component is not usually depreciable unless the NRO is done by the hardware vendor, and the cost is negotiated in advance. Other capex costs can include the cost of the underlying transmission network (in some countries this is leased). For NFV, the transmission network (and eventually the hardware maintenance) can be leased from the owner of the data center, which turns this cost into an opex component as it becomes a recurring cost.

A major advantage of SDN/NFV is in its opex, which gives the operators the ability to rapidly provision new services. Service roll-out is reduced by an order of magnitude of months to days. Moreover, with fast service roll-out, a new service can be tested with a limited set of customers first, and then upon favorable feedback it can be introduced to the entire target market. This can save a lot of headache (and money) later if the service turns out to be not as well received as it was expected.

Today, most infrastructures that are built on purpose-built hardware are going to stay in operation for a while and in many cases even after they are fully depreciated. Therefore, while migration to function virtualization is moving forward, operators will face a period of a “double opex” cost factor. This is not lost on anyone, and it can become a factor in delaying the decision to virtualization.

The move to virtualization requires a close study of the intermediate and long-term goals of the organization: customer needs, market penetration goals, and service offering to name a few. Although cost containment is a big factor, the revenue side of the equation must be given a much higher weight to remain competitive. After all, costs cannot go below zero, but the sky is the proverbial limit for revenue generation! And this is where SDN/NFV based infrastructures shine: rapid deployment of new and potentially lucrative services.

Click for more information about Robert Haim.

 
         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

The Time Is Now for NFV

Traditional network architectures based upon purpose-built network appliances and the resulting complex manual and proprietary systems interfaces used to support a rapidly increasing diversity of network appliances have been identified as the root causes of high-cost, poor capacity scaling, and long deployment and innovation cycles. This is affecting the sustainability of network operators’ business models. As a result, network operators have launched their NFV initiatives to overcome the limitations of traditional network architecture. NFV is explicitly designed to reduce cost, and increase network scalability and agility. 

ACG’s whitepaper shows that the common platform approach is uniquely able to support a sustainable business model through implementation of NFV and that appliance-based and NFV custom vertical software stack approaches are likely to fail.

Click to download the TCO “Visualizing the Mobile Core.”

Click for more information about ACG's business case analysis consulting research service.

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then)

…and how reflecting on this can help navigate the path ahead in realizing the promise of the new software-defined model

A number of parallels exist between the nascent forms of software-defined networking (SDN) we are working with today and the early stages of development in a similar area of technology that began in the mid 1990s and required more than a decade of steady enhancements to become the essential part of many network deployments that MPLS is today.

By looking at these parallels we can gain some perspective on the nature of such innovations and, yes, their related upheavals, as well as inspiration for continuing to work hard on the finer points of implementation that will ultimately bring the simplified, more agile design model of SDN into wider use.

Let’s look at the parallels in point-counterpoint mode.

Today: We often say in moments of exasperation things such as there are too many forms of SDN; it will die before lift-off because the parts just won’t play with each other.

Then: In 1997 the comments were that there were too many forms of MPLS (too many ways distributing labels in a network, TDP, LDP, BGP, etc.), and how will we ever build multivendor deployments? In the end, meeting customers’ requirements whittled options down to a few basic alternatives that allowed for some choice, but ensured multivendor networks using MPLS could be built.

Today: There are too many choices for communicating with elements southbound from controllers; there is no real hope for efficiencies and scaling in control plane abstractions.

Then: In the late 90s on MPLS we said things such as there are too many choices for implementing VPNs, quality of service and traffic engineering with MPLS; we will never be able to build real service offerings. But eventually customers’ requirements brought RSVP-TE, MP-BGP, VPLS, and BGP/MPLS IP VPNs into play as means of meeting market requirements with interoperable designs.

Today: People ask, how do I monitor this (add your own euphemism) thing and dismissively assert that SDN will forever be a lab experiment unless the real-time and on-going needs of managing such software-driven solutions can be met.

Then: In the early days of MPLS we said similar things. MPLS was interesting in the lab, but it would never be adopted widely unless we solved the OA&M problem. And with the firm guidance of customers’ demands the development of mechanisms to manage MPLS networks evolved via RFC 4379, LSP ping, LSP traceroute, and other mechanisms widely employed today.

And as we speak, innovation around MPLS is not yet dead despite its widespread adoption. EVPN and Segment Routing are two cases in point for how the evolution continues.

By reflecting on these innovations and their refinement over time, we can perhaps weave in a modest amount of patience amidst the stream of developments and implementation models we are digesting with the new designs that are ushering SDN incrementally into our multidomain, multilayer, and multivendor world.

In the end it may not matter if OpenFlow, XMPP, and NETCONF coexist in portions of an otherwise abstracted control plane. It may not matter that the service management templates used in different controllers vary greatly in implementation today, as they may evolve to converge on a few basic models as customers’ deployments continue, as happened with MPLS OAM.

No doubt we are in the disruptive, chaotic, and sometimes confusing phase of innovation when it comes to SDN (for the WAN, for overlay networks, for underlay physical systems, for VNFs, etc.). But if we focus on the gains available from the architecture that have been shown in their early forms to date (flexibility in platform choice, efficiency and scale in monitoring large network systems, and acceleration of new service deployment, to name a few examples) and work on closing the gaps in the implementations that remain to be resolved for the deployments to be pursued with more confidence, we may benefit in a manner similar to the way we did from the persistence of the innovators who spawned MPLS and labored for its viable deployment in the wide array of use cases we have it deployed in today.

Click for more information about Paul Parker Johnson.

For more information about ACG’s SDN services, click here.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Carrier SDN: Networks as Agile as the Cloud

Operators need more agile ways to deliver network services if they’re to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. And many see Carrier Software-Defined Networking as the way forward.

Enabling Carrier SDN

Most of us know that remarkable gains in creating and deploying new services efficiently and at scale have been made in the cloud computing community. But in the network operator community we also know that a significant impediment to delivering new services with the agility of the cloud is the rigidity of the networks we deploy and the processes we use to define and instantiate the services.

Vendors have expended a great deal of effort in recent years to enhance network flexibility. Solutions have begun to appear that address parts of the problem, but they have typically been constrained to a particular function or domain and have not actually solved the overall agile service delivery problem for networks.

I’ve just had the opportunity to study the new Alcatel-Lucent Network Services Platform (NSP) and believe it has attributes that will interest operators who aspire to deliver services in a new way by enabling Carrier SDN.

What it is

The NSP is a unified solution that creates agility in network service delivery. It brings efficiency and flexibility to the front-end problems of new service creation and the immediate downstream problems of operating those services efficiently and intelligently in a multilayer, multidomain, multivendor network. It does so in a unified and holistically designed solution.

What I liked about it

NSP breaks the OSS/BSS logjam in network service creation. It uses open RESTful APIs northbound for OSS and BSS integration and important data modeling standards and templates for network and service representation. Services and networks are represented once to multiple OSS and BSS applications, eliminating the need to define the same service multiple times to different modules so they can talk to a range of vendors’ platforms.

1. NSP associates service policies and tenant contexts with newly defined services, and applies them broadly across the target network infrastructure. We analyzed development of a new bandwidth calendaring service by a representative operator and discovered that NSP brings improvements over 50 percent in both time and resources definition compared to present modes of operation.

2. As service templates travel southbound they’re converted by a versatile mediation engine into the semantics and formats needed to work with each IP/MPLS and optical network platform being managed. This auto-conversion dramatically simplifies and streamlines the provisioning process for service offerings across network layers, vendors, and domains.

3. Communication southbound with NSP is supported by multiple important multivendor standard protocols:

• BGP-LS

• PCEP

• NETCONF

• SNMP

• OpenFlow, future, where used

Special cases for vendor CLI support are also included for simplification.

4. NSP bridges the gap between service automation and network optimization. On-demand service provisioning becomes network-aware and makes best use of available network assets during service placement. Dynamic network optimization uses network and service health to drive changes that ensure ongoing service quality and network efficiency.

5. Alcatel-Lucent has integrated functionality derived from 1,000s of operator deployments in both optical and IP/MPLS layers to enhance NSP’s value. For example, three distinct path computation engines are available to meet operator requirements:

• Packet-oriented PCE (PCE-P) for use with IP/MPLS paths

• Optically-oriented PCE (PCE-T) for use with optical paths

• Multilayer PCE (PCE-X) for use in multilayer path optimization

PCEs define paths in line with service policies at provisioning time, and KPIs are monitored in real time to determine if adjustments of any sort are called for as operations progress.

6. Alcatel-Lucent has incorporated unique and innovative algorithms for resource optimization. For instance, self-tuned adaptive routing for LSPs helps the network adapt allocations in real time according to policies and service delivery needs, producing further efficiencies and revenue-generating capacity.

The NSP seems to supply a missing link in solving the wide area network agility problem by leveraging the benefits of Carrier SDN. service providers will be interested in how its combination of functions has the right attributes for turning WANs into agile service delivery platforms. And it’s likely to be a major contributor to many operators looking to make their networks as agile as the cloud.

Click here to download Paul Parker-Johnson’s business case.

For more information about Paul Parker-Johnson, click here.

Click here for more information about ACG’s SDN service.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Making the Business Case: Network Analytics for the New IP

An analytics offloading use case conducted by ACG Research compares the total cost of ownership of Brocade’s architecture with two PMO alternative architectures. The Brocade architecture has 23 percent to 33 percent lower TCO than the PMO alternatives. Brocade’s advantage is due to its use of virtual network functions hosted on virtual machines and the agility and elasticity achieved though Brocade’s orchestration system. A network monitoring and customer experience management use case compares the TCO of Brocade’s virtual architecture to an appliance-based architecture (PMO) and finds a 43 percent TCO savings for the Brocade architecture.

Click to download the Brocade NVA TCO Whitepaper_ACG.

For more information about ACG's business case analysis services contact info@acgcc.com.

ACG HotSeat: Brocade on Mobile Analytics for Next-Gen Networks

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Delivering Policy Continuity at Scale in Cloud IT and Managed Network Services

Markets have been busy recently with announcements of solutions to help service providers benefit from powerful innovations in SDN, NFV and cloud computing systems. Solutions are emerging for fixed and mobile network environments, and for business and consumer applications. Pockets of solutions are emerging to address one part or another of an operator’s end-to-end environment, for example, increasing elasticity in mobile packet cores, simplifying business customer premise (CPE) configurations, and instantiating VNFs dynamically into cloud-based IT services.

While progress in pockets is good, designers also have to keep in mind that customer experiences exist on an end-to-end basis, at each point of consumption and across the aggregated performance of each domain involved in the service. Indeed, by embracing the cloud-based paradigm we are pursuing a goal in which services–and the policies that control them–are dynamically managed across the collection of resources that support them.

At its highest level, this is a job for service-level orchestration, for platforms that ‘think’ about a service end-to-end. Domain-specific solutions that optimize for local requirements can be integrated into a total service using northbound plug-ins and APIs. In essence a new design challenge for SPs has emerged: to optimize the mosaic of new virtual elements while still achieving a high-quality operation. How efficient (or complicated) this is depends to a degree on how efficiently the ‘gold vein’ of consistent service policies can be deployed into an end-to-end path at scale. How well an SP can do this will affect both quality of experience for the customer as well as total cost of ownership and return on investment for the SP.

One approach to mastering this challenge is to build using solutions that employ a consistent framework for managing policies across multiple domains, such as end-user CPE, wide area networks, and cloud computing data centers. The overall goal could be approached by focusing on key building blocks of the end-to-end service environment and managing its policies consistently, thereby getting a start on the overall goal. For example, managing networking resources consistently would be one way of achieving continuity at scale, at least for the network underpinning user applications. This approach requires a policy management system that aligns the network ‘northbound’ consistently with the operator’s requirements and propagates policies for enforcing those requirements in a scalable manner to each virtual element that is deployed in multiple domains.

This is an ambitious, some might say, lofty goal. Yet realizing the goal of delivering services for many individual customers on demand and at scale and with consistently orchestrated quality requires just such a far-reaching implementation.

Of the solutions that have arrived to market recently, one that embodies these attributes well is Nuage Networks’ virtualized networking portfolio. Nuage’s VNS solution (Virtualized Network Services for distributed enterprise sites) and VSP (Virtualized Services Platform for cloud-based data center services) use a common policy manager, the Virtualized Services Directory (VSD), to orchestrate policies across all of its domains. At the same time, VSD uses a consistent northbound interface to orchestrators such as OpenStack and CloudStack-based platforms. With this versatility and scale, Nuage is realizing the goal of managing an operator’s policies efficiently, on demand, and at scale to a widely distributed set of resources.

Thus, while it is possible to start transitioning infrastructures to virtualized designs one domain at a time, it is also possible to build on an architecture that consistently spans multiple domains on an end-to-end basis. In this way, an operators may simultaneously increase efficiency and increase the quality of customers’ experiences. In doing so, they would measurably accelerate their progress to delivering cloud-based services on demand across an entirely virtualized service delivery infrastructure with consistent end-to-end policy control.

For more ACG whitepapers, blogs and videos about Nuage Networks, click here.

For more information about Paul Parker-Johnson click here.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, click here.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

Business Process Redesign Is Essential to NFV/SDN Success

Leading telecom operators began the network function virtualization initiative several years ago in recognition of the need to reduce cost increases and increase revenue growth rates to sustain profitability. While much technical process on NFV and related SDN technology has been made, I believe business process redesign is needed to change the organization and people's jobs if the financial benefits are to be realized. 

Read more in Business Process Redesign Is Essential to NFV/SDN Success by Michael Kennedy.

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

Nuage/ALU on the VNS Solution in an SP Context

Accelerating time to deployment, enabling differentiation, achieving policy continuity for services and applications from the endpoint to the cloud, and streamlining operations with the same automation and elastic system architecture at every key point in a network deployment aspirations widely pursued by both enterprise IT teams as well as service providers providing cloud and network services to business and enterprise customers. With the introduction of its Virtualized Network Services solution, building on the strengths of its already available Virtualized Services Platform for cloud and virtual data center networks, Nuage Networks is enabling the kind of pervasive agility its enterprise and SP customers have been searching for by bringing the benefits of cloud and virtual infrastructure technologies to enterprise branch and distributed network sites. 

Click here to download report of ACG’s analysis of the VNS offering and its contribution to achieving these goals in its Research Note on VNS.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, contact sales@acgresearch.net.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Becoming an Agile Operator in a Globally Connected World

Growth in application uptake and related traffic volumes are outpacing the ability of legacy platforms to keep pace. Providers are aware that they not only need new solutions but also need new models ​for how computing and networking should be done to meet demand and growth. The answer​ is in use of virtualized platforms and open modular software, which are providing order of magnitude improvements in scale, agility and TCO versus legacy designs. Cloud-based applications and IT investments are delivering payback periods of less than one to between two and three years depending on the service. Virtualized network functions are demonstrating ​sustainable ​ reductions in TCO of 40–65 percent, doubling the speed of new service deployments.

Operators can secure efficiencies and paybacks ​in these ranges ​ by starting on targeted programs of adopting the virtualized platform ​model. With the prospect of benefits from virtualization being as broad and substantial as the early evidence shows they can be, the primary imperative for an operator’s team is to choose the areas in which early implementations can be trialed, aligning those targets with a coherent vision of how service offerings might evolve moving forward, and building on the progress achieved. The track record of cloud and virtual platform implementations to date has shown that remarkable acceleration of innovations and new service developments can be achieved in fractions of the time previously required to deliver functionality. The relative efficiencies in deploying and scaling the solutions that gain traction allow for an order-of-magnitude improvement on total costs of operation.

Click here to read the research brief.

For more information about ACG's SDN consulting and syndicated services, contact sales@acgresearch.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net

NFV Is an Opportunity Change Network Operators' Business Models

Network Functions Virtualization explicitly targets the two biggest problems facing network operators: bringing costs in line with revenue growth expectations and improving service velocity. The basis of Network Functions Virtualization is that industry standard IT virtualization technology (servers, switches, and storage) located in data centers, network nodes or end-users' premises can be used to reduce the cost and increase the speed of service delivery for fixed and mobile networking functions. Read More.

For more information about ACG's business case analysis services, contact sales@acgresearch.net.

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch