Alca-Lu pitches carrier SDN from Layer 3 to optical

There's still too many disparate systems for carriers to easily go down the software-defined network (SDN) path, Alcatel-Lucent reckons, and it's pitching a network services platform (NSP) to change that.

The company's VP of product marketing for IP routing and transport, Manish Gulyani, spoke to The Register's networking desk to outline the NSP, which Alca-Lu says gives carriers a unified SDN platform from the optical layer up to Layer 3.

“For every overlay, there's an underlay,” he said. “Iif there's a failure of optical, what happens? If there's a failure of IP adjacency, what happens?

“The NSP is not just IP – this is all the way down to the Layer 1 services”.

The NSP is a straight software sell. It runs as a VM on x86 or AMD architectures, scales out by adding new instances, with northbound hooks into OSS / BSS environments and southbound interfaces into the network.

As things now stand, carriers are afflicted with the same manual provisioning challenges as exist in the pre-SDN data centre: a customer places a new order, which has to be run into the operational support system (OSS); engineers have to ensure the site connection can support the new order, then provision the relevant switches, and make sure all the network paths can support the service.

That, in turn, means checking available capacity on routers, setting up the IP/MPLS network and Ethernet infrastructure, and assigning the customer ports to the optical paths at the bottom of it all.

“Today, services are manual or semi-automated provisioning. It takes days/weeks to turn on an enterprise site,” Gulyani told El Reg.

He added that carriers' – and the customers' – old assumptions were inflexible: once connected, the site stays that way for years, meaning carriers could provision their underlying network on a month-by-month basis.

To make the network cope with customers' expectations for the cloud, that has to change. In the NSP, Gulyani said, Alcatel-Lucent wants to unify the service automation operations with optimisation in a multivendor environment.

To get that multivendor support, the NSP uses a suite of standard protocols to gather the network information: PCEP (Path Computation Element Communication Protocol in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5440 RFC 5440); BGP LS (link state) to gather routing information, and the venerable OSPF and IS-IS protocols.

“To provide automation you need … to understand the IP layer, the MPLS, the optical, and the interplay between them”, he explained. This lets the carrier manage the capacity that exists between the sites, the capacity that's already been booked, and the utilisation of those links.

To that underlying data, the Alca-Lu NSP creates APIs and portals to process service requests – without, Gulyani added, a new order being to tightly tied to the network technology.

“You're not talking about technology but business, and we translate that into a certain implementation in the network”, he said.

“We're providing a single platform with a simple API to the OSS,” he said, noting that analyst firm ACG reckons this could save 50 per cent of costs compared to only partly-automated processes.

Better network utilisation – a Bell Labs algorithm in the system carries out path search and path placement for efficient use of resources – means carriers should be able to drive “more than 20 per cent more revenue-generating traffic” without a network upgrade.

The closest direct competitor to the NSP, Gulyani reckons, is Cisco which is working to integrate its Tail-F and Cariden acquisitions into its own development efforts. Juniper and Huawei are in the network optimisation space, while Ciena and Ericsson have a WAN control environment. ®