Defining the New Role of Orchestration
NEC/Netcracker's white paper discusses how orchestration needs to step up in a big way for service providers to bridge gaps in hybrid networks.
With the emergence of new IoT, 5G and cloud-based services, it’s more important than ever for service providers to automate operations at the service level. NEC/Netcracker’s white paper, “The New Role of Orchestration,” discusses how optimizing orchestration will enable service automation in hybrid networks, helping to merge silos, fill operational gaps and leverage a new implementation approach.
Service automation is very difficult to achieve in siloed operational environments, which often consist of traditional OSS, SDN controllers and NFV orchestration. Managing services manually or semi-manually across physical and virtualized environments, which is often the case when service providers shift to hybrid networks, is expensive and time-consuming. The fact is that service providers simply cannot make their customers wait for their services. They need to automate service management in order to satisfy the demand for on-demand availability, ordering and modification.
Merging Silos
An orchestration environment has the ability to merge the functional capabilities of traditional OSS, NFV orchestration and SDN controllers and break down silos. By merging these functional capabilities, they become hybrid, allowing for consistent configuration management and automation. And by breaking down silos, network domains can be managed in a closed loop, helping to scale, heal and optimize resources and services automatically.
Filling Operational Gaps
It’s very important for service providers to close any operational gaps in their networks, as these can lead to a wide array of problems. One of the operational gaps today relates to VNF license management, which isn’t standardized. Multivendor license management can break networks when licenses expire, so it is important that VNF license management is centralized and efficient. Centralized VNF license management provides essential functional capabilities, including automated lifecycle management for multivendor VNFs, centralized license capacity tracking, third-party VNF license unification and license policy management.
Leveraging a New Implementation Approach
Since hybrid services are geographically distributed, their lifecycles should be automated using a distributed set of orchestration and management functions for specific domains. This approach is referred to as domain orchestration (DO). DO automates lifecycles inside its respective domain, combining the orchestration and management components needed to support the diverse functional and non-functional requirements of each domain. Using the DO approach, services can be automated from end to end over multiple domains.
NEC/Netcracker’s Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) solution supports fully automated lifecycle orchestration across traditional and virtualized environments for all digital services. With its proven expertise and track record in transformation programs around the world, NEC/Netcracker helps service providers migrate to hybrid networks and optimize orchestration in order to achieve their operational and business goals.
Check out the white paper to learn more about achieving service automation and how NEC/Netcracker can help.