You’ve probably driven a car packed with boxes or other supplies that obscure your view. You may also have motored down the highway during a fierce rainstorm in a vehicle with worn out windshield wipers.
That makes it tough to see what’s behind or ahead of you on the road, right?
Now imagine trying to navigate your journey with absolutely no visibility out of one or more of the windows. That can make the experience downright dangerous.
Well, that’s the kind of thing service providers are dealing with today as they attempt to manage multi-layer networks. The problem is in large part due to their lack of visibility and orchestration across IP/MPLS and optical layers. And that often stems from the fact that different organizations with the service provider manage different layers of the network, and they don’t work together to understand the big picture
This limited view and control can prevent them from seeing and troubleshooting network problems, and restoring network resources and services. It also can slow their ability to introduce new, revenue-generating services.
That can be downright dangerous for service providers. They may not be able to meet customer service level agreements, suffer network outages, and/or be surpassed by their competitors. These kinds of things can lead to customer churn, extra costs, loss of reputation, and loss of revenues and marketshare.
However, intelligent multi-layer orchestration can bring everything together to allow for better visibility and orchestration. Ciena’s Blue Planet is such a solution.
It allows for orchestration and visibility across Layers 0 through 3. That enables faster mean time to identify and mean time to restore.
For example, Blue Planet offerings can allow a service provider customer to request a connection between their data center and new branch, for instance. The customer can leverage the solution’s user information or open API to input the request. That request then assesses the IP/MPLS layer topology and routing path information to select a new IP path to suit this request. The system uses that information to provision an end-to-end IP path. And if an optical path is required as well, that gets provisioned too.
Edited by Maurice Nagle