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The Third Network...

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 11-2014    Views: 1742   






Chris Purdy, CTO at CENX outlines a network that does the thinking for you, freeing up innovation, and explains the MEF's Third Network vision.

Hello World! It's a simple statement, and yet it is shorthand for an immensely complex process involving millions of neural events that begins with fingers reaching out to hold down the shift key and tap the "H" key. Then, the activation of thousands of co-operating muscle cells to cause a precise physical action.

So how can one write a word without being overwhelmed by the complexity? Well, because tapping a key is a learned automatic motor response. It also involves a layer of learning involving illustrating complex ideas by analogy. This layered abstraction of the human mind evolved over millions of years: computer science has achieved something similar, in just seven decades.

However, networking and telecom operations still work in functional silos. For example we have separate inventory, provisioning performance and fault management systems. Each functional system holds detailed information of all network domains, including optical, Ethernet or IP. A change in any one domain would require changes in all systems and that takes extraordinary effort, time and money.

THE THIRD NETWORK AND SERVICE ORCHESTRATION
MEF has recently announced its new vision: a Third Network that delivers Internet-like agility and ubiquity with Carrier Ethernet 2.0-like performance and security. The Third Network promises the best of both worlds with agile, assured and orchestrated services.

End-to-end Service Orchestration manages the entire lifecycle of connectivity services: ordering, fulfilment, performance, usage, and analytics. It holds detailed service inventory of all services in a layer or domain, providing the necessary APIs for information exchange between service providers and internal systems operating at other layers. It can be compared to those layers of intelligence in the brain that manage the higher, learned skills like language and critical decision making.

Consider a Service Orchestrator with a set of software modules that can be integrated within an existing network operation, utilising open APIs to interface with existing systems. An orchestrator is specifically designed to support multi-layered network domains and new technologies such as NFV and SDN, so it need only know and enforce the service level parameters, not how the service is implemented. The lower diagram, Service Visualization, summarises the broad functions.

SERVICE ORCHESTRATION: ENABLING THE FUTURE
Soaring data usage and high service expectations mean that providers must deploy their services ever more flexibly, quickly and with impressive quality from day one. This can only be achieved by Service Orchestration. As there are no limits to an intelligent brain’s potential, so there are no limits to the number of ways that Service Orchestration helps service providers with large, complex networks.

As Glen Ragoonanan, Principal Analyst at Analysys Mason says, "SDN and NFV adoption is being inhibited by a lack of standards and the immaturity of OSS, policy-based controller products that can integrate with operators' existing environments." Service Orchestration is filling that gap, offering the performance and elasticity needed for NFV, network scalability, and real-time big data analytics. Additionally its open REST APIs allow faster integration for SDN controllers and NFV management components.

NFV and SDN underpin the Third Network. Together they promise lower capital and operating costs and service potential and agility; however, they demand a fundamentally new approach to managing network services. It will need to orchestrate services top-down, across physical and virtualised infrastructures, across multiple vendors, and across multiple carriers.

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