Intelligent Automation: The Key to Global NFV Deployments at Scale

Transcription

1 Intelligent Automation: The Key to Global NFV Deployments at Scale

2 Telcos & CSPs can achieve NFV automation today After a five-year, heavy-lift software development stage, Telcos and CSPs (communications services providers) realize with mobile application and data demand skyrocketing, IoT and Edge poised to explode and 5G coming, they have no choice but to digitally transform themselves to compete in the 21st century. By 2019, 70% of all CSP/Telcos will have conducted proof of concept/pilot projects. They are now chomping at the bit to get in on one of the most important transformations in the history of the networking industry. After all, they touch almost every person on earth with their mobile services. To get there fast, they're pouring money into NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), believing correctly that it will enable them to deliver the mobile, data-centric services that their customers are demanding. But can they? So far, their strides have been stalled or are too slow. If NFV is in a race for real-world results, too many initiatives are getting bogged down at the starting line, sometimes for years. It's not that the technology itself is immature far from it it's that network engineers are being asked to deliver NFV networks armed with limited and inadequate capabilities. It's as if you were asked to design a modern car engine equipped only with pre-digital drafting tools t-ruler, compasses, and graph paper. To navigate the deep complexity of NFV networks, you need something much more sophisticated you need the equivalent of an AutoCAD for virtual networking. The Rise of NFV NFV delivers agile, lower-cost network infrastructure to support user demands for new digital services. These two interlinking realities are fueling NFV's momentum: CSPs and telcos are compelled to respond to OTT players and hyperscale cloud service providers pressure. CSP network architecture is highly rigid and dependent on expensive hardware-based appliances. NFV decouples the networking software from their traditional proprietary hardware so they can run on commercial off-the-shelf servers.

3 By 2020 the NFV market (software, hardware, and services) will hit $15.5B. (and it could be a lot more, given that 5G technology will begin to transform the industry again.) What's missing from the NFV Process By decoupling network functions from infrastructure, NFV enables you to accelerate delivery of new services, scale up quickly in response to rising traffic demands and to do it with low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware instead of expensive, proprietary telco equipment. But as CSPs push NFV towards production, they are quickly realized that designing, configuring and testing NFV networks are far from straightforward tasks. Even after five years of intensive development, software standards remain in flux, adding a new layer of complexity to the network designer's world, already awash in intricate protocols. You need absolute confidence that the various components of your new service work well together before you roll it into production. You need to know that your network will survive a spike in demand. You don't want to find out too late that it can't if, say, a new iphone or a new app comes out, suddenly driving up traffic. Building NFV systems today around requirements like these involves a multitude of manual, expensive and error-prone processes. That's true despite the emergence of MANO NFV-specific MANagement and Orchestration as an essential building block of carrier-grade virtualized networks. MANO provides a framework for managing virtual network functions (VNFs) and other software components, as well as the compute, storage, and networking resources in the architecture. CSPs understand that without MANO to support the rollout of their virtualized services, much By 2019, 50% will have plans in place to drive production implementation for initial use cases.

4 Does your MANO solution enable? 1 Universal VNF onboarding with intelligent modeling 3 2 A visual drag-and-drop design environment An intelligent user-assist design system 5 ETSI, TOSCA and OSM compliance 4 Intelligent design validation An effective MANO offering should deliver at least these five crucial capabilities! of the agility, operational and cost-benefit of NFV will be lost, and they will struggle to leverage the full capabilities of tomorrow's 5G technology. But while all service providers agree that a new class of management and orchestration is required, the first wave of MANO software products have had significant gaps. The solutions on the market today provide only a basic subset of the capabilities that network designers need to operationalize NFV. These systems provide rudimentary tools for new service instantiation, but little in the way of guidance or control in assembling them. They lack carrier class automation and highly intelligent network validation capabilities. That leaves the network engineer struggling with questions: Do I put the load balancer here? Do I put the firewall there? How do I handle connectivity to OSS/BSS? How do I interconnect everything? This leads to slow NFV rollouts and human error. Meanwhile, competitive pressure from OTTs and hyperscale cloud vendors continues to bite into margins, and network equipment suppliers continue to bolster their bargaining positions. CSPs can't afford to wait any longer for NFV initiatives to finally gain traction and accelerate away from the starting line. They need a different approach. They need Intelligent Automation for NFV.

5 Pensa Maestro doesn't just indicate the building blocks of your service; it drives the whole process, supporting your network services designers at every step, so you can: Onboard: Easily and quickly onboard VNFs and other software elements. Design: Pensa radically simplifies the design process; as you drag and drop elements into place, it automatically builds your model. Validate: Intelligent validation ensures your network will work, saving time and reducing risk. Build: Pensa Maestro lets you build a sandbox and output your design to virtually any orchestration software for deployment. Intelligent Automation for NFV Pensa provides the first carrier-class intelligent automation software platform for network functions virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO). Unlike any other NFV solution to date, Pensa simplifies and accelerates NFV solution deployments so that you can bring new services to market in months, rather than years. Imagine a world where you could lead the pack of a whole new class of digital service provider rather than scrambling to keep up with competitors. A world where you delivered mobile apps nobody has thought of, or on the fly, controlling remote networks in far-flung parts of the world. That world is here today because Pensa has made NFV at scale a reality, while at the same time reducing manual errors and overhead costs. Simply put, Pensa is uniquely suited to help telcos and CSPs leverage the latest at-scale NFV automation technology today.

6 About Pensa Pensa is a cloud-based intelligent platform that enables the rapid adoption of virtual data centers. Pensa Maestro serves as the "brains" for the next-generation data center by providing simple drag-and-drop infrastructure development, single-click deployment, and the ability to import custom applications to create an integrated, production-ready environment, while eliminating manual complexity and improving cost-efficiencies for SDDC, Cloud and DevOps. Headquarters 295 North Bernardo Ave, Suite 200 Mountain View, CA info@pensa.ai 2018 Pensa Inc. All rights reserved. India 9th Floor, Olympia Platina, Plot No.33-B South Phase, Guindy Industrial Estate Chennai