Solving the Carrier Ethernet Management Puzzle
By Carl Moberg, Tail-f Systems, and Asif Hazarika, IP Infusion
Carrier Ethernet management is a key issue in developing equipment for providing Ethernet services. Standards organizations such as Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) now provide the basis for mature software building blocks. However, practical experience with new services such as Carrier Ethernet obviously brings new insight into management issues and needed features.
Carrier Ethernet networks require improved management because they are complex to configure, undergo frequent changes, and have major issues with delays or disruptions. Provisioning them requires multiple configuration changes. The frequency of such changes is high as services are often turned up and torn down, and attributes, such as bandwidth, are changed on the fly. Lastly, customers expect fast service and spotless quality as they migrate from legacy services such as TDM-based links.
Carrier Ethernet service providers are demanding more from networking equipment providers in terms of both provisioning and configuration. Legacy software cannot keep up with the rate of change or the complexity of configuration changes in today’s networks.
Management must be fully automated from order fulfillment through service provisioning and on to configuration changes. Transaction management is essential as configuration changes in the network elements must be made in lockstep and only committed to live production if they can all be executed consistently for all parameters. Capabilities to validate changes, commit them in transactions, and rollback to known working states are key features here.
On-device configuration management applications also must provide consistent interfaces. A common backplane across interfaces and data models describing the configuration structure is essential to avoid requiring separate application code for each management interface. With modern networking systems typically requiring CLI, SNMP, Web UI, and NETCONF interfaces, the benefits of avoiding stovepipe architectures are significant.
The MEF is playing a major role in defining standards and use cases for managing Carrier Ethernet services and network elements. MEF 7 and MEF 7.1 define NMS/EMS service models with use cases for services such as E-Line and E-LAN. They also define use cases for individual elements and ports. Mapping between the service and device layers is most effective if done using the same data modeling language and software, minimizing translation code.
For example, Tail-f Systems and IP Infusion provide a pre-integrated solution for building IEEE and MEF standards-compliant Carrier Ethernet products. This helps network equipment providers accelerate time to market and focus on areas of product differentiation. The combined solution leverages Tail-f Systems’ NCS and ConfD configuration management software along with IP Infusion’s ZebOS protocols and communications applications.
Missing pieces of the Carrier Ethernet management puzzle are now becoming available. New standards use cases, and data models are being developed, along with control plane software. Providers of Carrier Ethernet services and their network equipment suppliers will both be able to bring products and services to market more quickly and more efficiently.
Carl Moberg is VP Marketing at Tail-f Systems, and Asif Hazarika is Senior Director of Product Management at IP Infusion. You can reach them at carl.moberg@tail-f.com and asifh@ipinfusion.com, respectively.