TMCnet News

Packet Design Fills WAN SDN Management Gap with SDN MANO Platform
[November 17, 2015]

Packet Design Fills WAN SDN Management Gap with SDN MANO Platform


Providing the industry's missing service management intelligence tier between SDN controllers and SDN applications in the wide area network, Packet Design (News - Alert) has launched the SDN Management and Orchestration (MANO) Platform. The product is the first independent, vendor-agnostic source of service management intelligence that provides access to the key analytics, optimization, and orchestration functions required by SDN applications. This intelligence is essential to creating dynamic, flexible networks that can be reconfigured quickly to accommodate different business requirements.

With real-time telemetry, analytics, optimization, and policy, the SDN MANO Platform can intelligently provision network services. This is especially relevant for service providers with complex, multi-service WANs. The ability to provision network resources dynamically to accommodate different service types, variable demands, and failures will result in benefits such as more resilient networks, accelerated service activation, improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer satisfaction, and better use of infrastructure and human resources, resulting in lower capital and operating expenses.

The SDN MANO Platform was built on the Packet Design Explorer suite's unique ability to record all routing events in real time, which is essential for SDN service management and orchestration outside the data center. Packet Design is the only company that correlates real-time routing and path behavior with traffic flows and network infrastructure performance, enabling customers to understand how routing events and failures affect the path and performance of critical service traffic.

The SDN MANO Platform maintains and uses routing topology models, traffic matrices, performance metrics, predictive analytics, optimization algorithms, and business policies to determine in real time if and how application requests for network resources can be satisfied. It calculates the impact that the requested changes will have on other services and also maintains historical traffic matrices to determine if network load is likely to change significantly after application requests are satisfied.

In addition, Packet Design is delivering its first SDN application. The SDN Traffic Engineering(SDN-TE) application leverages the SDN MANO Platform (via RESTful JSON APIs) to optimize and provision RSVP-TE tunnels based on available bandwidth and user-specified policies. The goal of the application is to balance link utilization, reducing the load on heavily congested links by shifting it to lightly used links. In this first release, the SDN-TE application is integrated with OpenDaylight controllers, but its design is SDN controller agnostic. The RESTful APIs give service providers, enterprises and other vendors the ability to leverage the platform components they need while developing their own custom SDN applications.



Quotes:

David Flamini, Principal Network Architect, Strategy & Service Innovation, Neutrona Networks:


"Earlier this year, Neutrona selected the Explorer products to help us assure the performance of critical services running over thousands of traffic-engineered tunnels in our pan-regional network. We are working closely with the Packet Design team to develop SDN applications that will enable us to accelerate service delivery and programmatically adapt our network to shifting business demands. By using the APIs, we are able to leverage Packet Design's rich analytics in our own custom applications."

Caroline Chappell, Principal Analyst, NFV & Cloud for Heavy Reading, in a new white paper:

"Recognizing the likelihood of SDN controller heterogeneity, the industry is starting to scope a new, three-layer architecture that inserts a controller-independent management layer between the SDN controller and third-party applications…An SDN management layer that provides end-to-end, real-time visibility of the IP/MPLS network, while leveraging the multi-vendor, programmable network capabilities of SDN controllers, offers CSPs {communications service providers} a powerful means of adapting the network to service demand in the hyperfast timescales their enterprise customers are demanding."

Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight Executive Director:

"OpenDaylight was built for SDN deployments on modern heterogeneous multi-vendor networks, and it's great to see Packet Design take the same approach with its SDN Management and Orchestration Platform. As SDN technology matures and becomes more widespread, management is critical. By creating the platform and integrating its first application with OpenDaylight, Packet Design is joining a thriving community developing and perpetuating solutions for all types of networks and use cases."

Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Packet Design CTO:

"When software is making decisions traditionally made by engineers, that software needs to be powered by the same know-how. Without the right analytics, the risks of SDN are unforeseen consequences such as conflicting commands from different controllers, degraded application performance, and over-provisioning of network resources. Using our field-proven, real-time telemetry and analytics as the foundation for the Packet Design SDN Management and Orchestration Platform, we are providing the service management and orchestration services, either bundled or a la carte, to give our customers more visibility into and control of SDN deployments outside the data center."

Additional Resources:

About Packet Design

Packet Design technology helps the leading network operators, enterprises, and government agencies across six continents deliver critical services across the cloud. The Explorer product suite uniquely combines routing, traffic, and performance analytics for real-time, path-aware operational monitoring and back-in-time forensics for troubleshooting transient problems that can cause major service disruptions. Interactive modeling helps engineers predict the impact of changes accurately, simulate new workloads for capacity planning, and test failure scenarios to build more resilient networks. With these analytics as a foundation, Packet Design is delivering SDN management and orchestration capabilities in complex, multi-service networks. Visit http://www.packetdesign.com for more information.


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]