Ericsson SDN and NFV Consulting Services

September 2014
Ericsson SDN
and NFV
Consulting
Services
the service provider
transformation
There is a significant transformation underway as
service providers merge the virtualization concepts
of the IT industry with software-based network
architectures to improve network agility, lower
costs, and speed up innovation. This new network
architecture, based on software defined networking
(SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)
will significantly shorten the time-to-market for
new products and services and allow networks to
be simply and cheaply set-up, torn down, scaled
and configured.
To navigate through the unchartered waters of
disruptive technologies such as SDN, and NFV
and deal with the increasing complexity of virtual
infrastructure, it is critical to ensure that the end-toend impact of changes are known and validated, and
potential risks are identified and mitigated. Service
providers must maintain business continuity while
realizing this vision, and through this process must
address several concerns:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Closing the infrastructure/application
integration and visibility divide by
correlating application degradation to
physical bottlenecks, and hence allowing a
software defined infrastructure to
proactively provision physical resources to
meet application SLAs.
Ability to make sense of large quantities of
data in real-time (big data analysis).
Bridging the gap between business
requirements and infrastructure configurations to achieve performance,
efficiency, and reliability goals.
Drastic changes in the types of operational
skills and methods needed to develop
and maintain services.
Impact of broad adoption of merchant silicon,
open source, common hardware abstraction
layers, and Linux like OSs to do basic
networking.
Maintaining networking performance while
using Commercial off the Shelf (COTS)
servers, switches, routers, and storage and
virtualization.
Impact of centralized control, and
distributed NFV deployments.
Although cloud, SDN, and NFV rely on common notions like NFV MANO (Management and
Orchestration), they are all evolving in their own separate spaces, hence necessitating a unified
approach to drive forward in all three of these revolutions.
Ericsson recognizes that there are many players in all three technology areas of cloud, SDN, and NFV,
each offering parts of the overall solution for a SDN/NFV enabled infrastructure, which creates major
issues for operators, such as:
• Each vendor has a different approach to NFV
and SDN.
• No vendor offers a single-source solution, and
most lack the credibility to integrate all the pieces of puzzle.
• A complete solution requires integration, which
is not trivial.
• Building a solution out of multiple vendors
solution to implement NFV, requires vision, an
overall architecture, and a credible ethodology
to help assemble all the pieces in an orderly
way.
• A multivendor solution that forms a product or
service results in a more complicated SLA from the participating vendors, making it more
difficult to isolate issues as they arise.
• Although operators are committed to NFV and
SDN, initial deployments are islands. No
operator will commit to a complete frastructure
refresh unless and until the pieces of the
puzzle fit together seamlessly and meet
operator reliability, scalability, cost and
performance requirements.
• The benefits operators hope for largely
center on “service agility” and “operations
efficiency” and yet the “island” nature of
these early trials makes it impossible
to realize these goals because a common
infrastructure across multiple applications
and services is necessary to increase
agility and drive down costs.
• Large scale change will only happen
through methodical upgrades and
revolutionized management, automation
and orchestration.
• For operators, to be confident about
something as revolutionary as SDN, NFV,
or the cloud, they have to be confident
that they have a trusted partner and a clear
architecture.
• Data center as a key element of network
infrastructure requires tight integration with
the network infrastructure.
Ericsson addresses these issues through a
holistic approach. Having strong professional
services, deep understanding of operator
environments and infrastructures, proven
methodologies and frameworks, a credible
ecosystem leading the charge in SDN, NFV and
orchestration puts the trusted partner of service
providers globally in a unique position to fill the
gaps in the existing vendor solutions to realize the
full benefits of NFV, SDN, and cloud computing.
Ericsson believes that a full suite of consulting
and system integration services is key to a
successful network transformation. Ericsson
as the global leader in consulting services
and
system
integration
handles
over:
• 1,500 major consulting and systems
projects annually in multivendor
environments
• 600 OSS and Network Management
solutions annually
• 600 Billing, Mediation and Activation
solutions annually.
Ericsson fulfills a critical industry gap that exists
in the underlying support, tools, methodologies,
best practices, frameworks, and lab facilities to
test, validate, measure, analyze, assess, develop,
and model operational and technical aspects of
the NFV and SDN solutions, strategies, and a
wide range of development, and implementation
methodologies and options. Ericsson has built a
leading SDN and NFV consulting practice powered
by top industry and consulting professionals.
Ericsson consulting practice focus is to help
service providers build a functional, flexible, costeffective, and efficient infrastructure based on
a holistic approach and independent of vendor
products, leveraging “best-fit” products from a
wide range of 3rd party or Ericsson products.
Specializing in SDN and NFV Business
Planning, Strategy, Operations, Technology
consulting, and Systems Integration, the
Ericsson team is skilled, proficient, and able to
assist operators to transform their infrastructure
from concept to deployment to maintenance.
FIGURE 1: SDN / NFV CONSULTING MODEL
Specializing in SDN and NFV Business Planning, Strategy, Operations, Technology
consulting, and Systems Integration, the Ericsson team is skilled, proficient, and able to assist
operators to transform their infrastructure from concept to deployment to maintenance.
ericsson sdn / nfv
consulting and services
Ericsson realizes the impact of the emerging network virtualization technologies of NFV and SDN on
the services, service models, operational processes and support systems of service providers who
are actively exploring network virtualization technologies. Ericsson services are focused not only on
service providers’ present state of play (activities, concerns and considerations), but milestones to
transform operations to a level of automation and maturity to achieve true readiness and agility for a
fully virtualized infrastructure. Ericsson’s SDN and NFV consulting practice provides comprehensive
services to work in a multi-vendor environment. The Ericsson SDN and NFV Consulting and Service
portfolio includes:
1.
Technology assessments and analysis
2.
Business assessment and analysis
3.
Modeling, optimization, and benchmarking
4.
Technology and transformation Planning
5.
Operations strategies and transformation
6.
Defining frameworks, business cases, and milestones
7.
Compliance test, evaluation, audit, certification
8.
Development and design
9.
Real time Portal and dashboard design
10.Deployment
11. Solution Management
12.Training
FIGURE 2: SDN / NFV SERVICE FRAMEWORK
1. Technology Analysis and assessments
Ericsson offers analysis and assessment services that include a wide range of technology, service,
strategy, and operations analysis and assessments including gap, performance, efficiency, risk,
security, and governance, specifically:
• Technology impact assessment and aligning
technology choices with business objectives
and goals
• Defining strategy, framework, and milestones
• Assessing and mitigating risks
• Assessing security capabilities for virtual
environment and recommending security best
practices
• Assessing OSS readiness to support the
transition from physical to increasingly virtual
networks
• Evaluating existing governance infrastructure
and recommending enhancements to support
software enabled, programmable infrastructure
• Conducting End-to-End analysis of network
services
• Identifying hypervisor and vSwitch
bottlenecks
• Reviewing financial, operational, and
organizational impacts and recommending its
best practices
• Scoping the underlying support elements
(middleware, OS, adapters, data stores,
languages, data models, message queues and
other architectural elements as necessary)
• Analysis and assessment of the agility of
inventory, assurance, and provisioning
• Analysis and assessment of the portals
• Identifying current network OS limitations and
recommend extensions to enable NFV scaling
2. Business Assessment and analysis
Ericsson offers business case analysis consulting around virtual services delivery. As part of this
consulting service, Ericsson works closely with Service Providers in analyzing and validating their
underlying costs and revenue assumptions in delivering a new virtual service(s). This includes a detailed
view into:
• Capital expenses for the underlying NFV
delivery architecture including equipment,
software, and services
• Operational expenses for support staff,
services and other ongoing costs
• Market driven analysis of the expected
revenues for the new virtual service(s).
Based on this analysis, Ericsson can identify
and recommend additional areas of cost savings
and identify the impacts of layering on additional
revenue generating services over time to achieve
or exceed the service provider’s ROI expectations.
This engagement can vary in duration and cost
based on the depth of analysis requested by the
customer.
Service Providers often struggle with the cost
model during early stages of NFV rollout,
Ericsson can analyze a Service Provider’s plans
for NFV rollout and develop a roadmap and
methodology that presents the best possible
return on investment. This is done by analyzing
the balance for each service between:
• New revenue generation
• Operations Expense Savings
• Capital Expense Savings
By advising which services to launch first,
which services are complimentary technically
and commercially, and documenting the vendor
ecosystem for service components. Ericsson
can provide the shortest path towards the value
that NFV promises.
Cost Modeling: using
Ericsson’s TCO and
TVO modeling tools
identify realistic capex
and opex savings
and predict potential
revenue streams using
industry average
numbers.
3. Modeling, optimization, benchmarking
Ericsson provides an open SDN and NFV test and
validation facility along with tools, analytics, real
time dashboard, and middleware, to address the
service provider SDN and NFV concerns as they
move to each stage of planning, deployment,
production, and maintenance.
FIGURE 3: SDN / NFV MODELING
Ericsson realizes the four steps of designing,
ordering, deploying, and managing a service.
However, Ericsson believes in model-driven
methodology where services can be modeled
and published in catalogue and used based on
policy, roles, SLA, and other metrics.
Ericsson modeling, optimization, and benchmarking services for SDN and NFV include:
• SDN Service Chain Performance Optimization:
In use cases such as virtual CPE, and service
chains made from virtual applications that
normally run on purpose built appliances, it can
be challenging to attain performance normally
expected. Ericsson Consulting has methods,
tools, and expertise to use in analyzing the goals
for the service and providing suggestions to
attain the best possible performance. Platform
design, hypervisor and orchestration choices,
acceleration techniques, and applications will
all be reviewed. Ericsson has partnerships with
best of breed vendors providing all components
of a carrier class NFV environment, and can
provide suggestions for configurations that meet
the customer’s goals for their service.
• Network service chaining use case modeling:
Utilize Ericsson Open SDN and NFV lab facilities,
real-time dashboard, middleware, analytics
platform, and tools to model various NFV service
chaining use cases, measure performance and
scalability, identify best location and structure
(remote, centralized, nested, federated) for NFVs.
Specifically, within its SDN+NFV lab facility
Ericsson can:
-
-
• Measurement of the performance of virtualized
network devices versus physical network devices:
- Measure the performance of NFVs using
various server, CPU, hypervisor products
(both for the data plane and control
plane)
- Measure the impact of NFVI, SDN, NFV
orchestrator products on performance
- Measure the impact of load, location, and
hierarchy level of service chains on
performance
- Measure the performance impact of
application mix.
- Right size the underlying NFVI to the
specific SP services
-
Verify the impact of virtual network
device service chaining in different
centralized, distributed, nested
configuration
Insert and remove NFVs from a service
chain
Change parameters of service chains for
“what if analysis”
View the performance characteristics in
the portal dashboard
Overlay NFV service chains to measure
the accumulative impact, identify
performance bottlenecks inEricsson’s
emulated environment, and right- size,
and identify optimum location for each
NFV or service chain.
• Operations service chaining use case modeling:
Utilize Ericsson Open SDN and NFV lab facilities,
real-time dashboard, middleware, tools, and
analytics platform to design, test, and validate
operational service chain use cases and measure
agility and efficiency as compared to the similar
existing operations processes.
4. Technology and transformation planning
Defining criteria for
grouping Network
Functions
Creating Multi-Phase
plan for transformation
to NFV
Developing groups
of Network Functions
based on the criteria
Defining NFV service
chains and identifying
service chain operation
and integration
requirements
Defining criteria for and
identifying high level
architecture for federated,
distributed, and nested
NFVs
Test and deployment planning
5. operations strategies and transformation
Ericsson realizes that an ability to operate within
a multivendor OSS environment is critical to
service providers. Furthermore, Ericsson realizes,
while OSS automation does not exist yet, service
providers view it as crucial to increase their service
agility as the linchpin for maximizing the benefits
of network virtualization and allowing them
to differentiate themselves from other service
provider as well as IT-centric competitors such
as Over the Top (OTT) and data center providers.
Furthermore an ability to operate the
infrastructure based on policies at each layer of
the infrastructure is needed to support the next
generation virtual and programmable network.
This complexity makes it very valuable for a
Carrier Service Provider to have a trusted partner
like Ericsson through this critical transformation.
As such Ericsson anticipates abstraction and
virtualization at multiple levels to manage physical
and virtual infrastructure. Ericsson realizes that in
order to tie together NFVOs (NFV orchestrators),
NMSs
(Network
Management
Systems),
EMSs (Element Management Systems), cloud
orchestrators, and NFV managers supplied by
various vendors components like middleware,
widget builders, tools, data models, and binding
elements to create a seamless operations support
environment are required.
In addition Ericsson realizes that collecting
sufficient intelligence and using predictive
analytics to enhance customer experience and
dynamically adjust resources to application and
service needs are critical.
FIGURE 4: NEW OSS/BSS DESIGN AREAS
Ericsson believes operations maturity will be an
evolutionary process, therefore OSS abstraction
provides a default migration path for them.
Initially, OSS abstraction can deliver service
fulfillment and assurance control for existing
services, through new software control layers of
VNF managers, NFVOs and SDN controllers. This
will be achieved in a streamlined way, with the
minimum disruption.
However, in the long run to realize agility and
efficiency gains, Ericsson is developing a new
generation of OSS/BSS that will orchestrate and
manage physical and virtual network resources
for both existing and new services, continually
reduce the complexity, development and
maintenance costs of service provider OSS, while
reducing the time and cost of integration through
open interfaces, and hardware and software
interoperability standards. Ericsson’s approach
to OSS/BSS transformation prescribes:
• Evolving the current OSS/BSS to reduce TTM
• Continue building capabilities to enable nearreal-time view and control of operations with
analytics driven policy based automation
• Implicit resource management
• Modernizing operations to converge network
and IT planning, build,
operations and maintenance
Specializing in SDN and
NFV Business Planning,
Strategy, Operations,
Technology consulting,
and Systems Integration,
the Ericsson team is
skilled, proficient, and
able to assist operators
to transform their
infrastructure from
concept to deployment to
maintenance.
Ericsson fulfills a critical industry gap that exists
in the underlying support, tools, methodologies,
best practices, frameworks, and lab facilities to
test, validate, measure, analyze, assess, develop,
and model operational and technical aspects of
the NFV and SDN solutions, strategies, and a
wide range of development, and implementation
methodologies and options. Ericsson has built a
leading SDN and NFV consulting practice powered
by top industry and consulting professionals.
Ericsson consulting practice focus is to help
service providers build a functional, flexible, costeffective, and efficient infrastructure based on
a holistic approach and independent of vendor
products, leveraging “best-fit” products from a
wide range of 3rd party or Ericsson products.
Ericsson NFV/SDN specific OSS/BSS services include:
• OSS/BSS transition strategy and planning:
Ericsson realizes that slow OSS/BSS
revolutionary path and maturity that may
take over 8 years may not be acceptable for
service providers. Ericsson will assist to
develop strategies to progress more quickly
through milestones, while still attaining some
business benefit and not inhibit the overall
virtual next generation OSS transformation
roadmap, including:
- Shared innovation
- Identifying particular OSS/BSS that are
candidates for quicker evolution while
other OSS functions could be migrated
later
- Progressing when sufficient VNFs are
available for end-to-end delivery of one or
more services
- Overlapping self-organizing networks
(SON) automation with virtual next
generation OSS requirements
- Developing a holistic service agility
framework and requirements for
moving towards automation,
• Defining key milestones of OSS maturity with
network virtualization
• Continue to gradually progress of
development, implementation and
rationalization of OSS/BSS in preparation
for transforming to a consolidated, slimmer
next generation of OSS architecture that
addresses challenges and gaps to
orchestrate, manage, and maintain next
generation infrastructure based on emerging
technologies.
• Operational readiness planning & testing
• Identifying operations functions that can be
modeled, embedded, and virtualized to
bring business benefit.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
IT convergence and innovation
Architectural deployment, migration,
integration
Transitioning legacy platforms and resources
Orchestration and abstraction
Operations support for on-demand services
Cloud, NDV, SDN management
Interoperability of legacy and cloud/NFV
orchestration
Policy and mode-based operations strategies
Virtual management platform evaluation
Defining and evaluating key agile operations
pillars: analytics, policy, intelligence
collection, abstraction, mapping, binding
Operations cost optimization
6. Defining frameworks, business cases and
milestones
•
•
•
•
Security framework
Governance framework
Harmonization, standardization framework
Disaster Recovery, back up framework for virtual network
7. compliance test evaluation, audit, certification
• Compliance testing: Open stack, ONF, ETSI, TOSCA, MANO, OpenFlow, and other relevant
standards , and regulatory rules
• Vendor APIs
• Interoperability testing
• Security audits or consulting
• Software License auditing
• Conducting performance and scalability tests to identify performance sustainability at scaled loads,
identify hypervisor delays, interrupts, memory access, queuing, and processing delays
• Conducting reliability and disaster recovery tests, hot backup, failure recovery
• Conducting availability tests on live network including live software upgrades
• Testing high-performance, multi-core data plane forwarding products and solutions and finding a
right balance/trade-off between software flexibility and hardware performance
• Evaluating and testing High power, High performing CPUs special accelerators
• Evaluating and hypervisor and vSwitch enhancements, plug-ins
• Measuring throughput and latency under heavy load, and varying
• Platform certification
8. development and design
• Service development
• Portal development
• Operations tools development (test,
troubleshooting, auditing, etc.)
• Designing service assurance for individual
applications
• Network Load Balancing design
• High availability design for applications
• Help design virtual network function (VNF)
managers or proxies
• Help design new OSS functions and features,
and APIs, needed to support virtual and
programmable networks
• Orchestration design: General orchestration
that spans the collection of services and
enables agile deployment and lifecycle
management of NFV services is important.
Ericsson can provide advanced consulting
services to develop structures that leverage
analytics and policy management, business
rules, and customer SLA’s to create carrier
class services on enterprise class
infrastructure.
•
Workflow Design:
Within the general topic of orchestration
comes the need to design workflows
for each service to support
- Instantiation
- Scale in, scale out
- Assurance
- High Availability and other functions
These may be prescribed by the VNF vendor at
first, but variations will be required over time.
Ericsson can design optimized workflows audited
to eliminate any potential service affecting issues
or security holes.
• Technical order orchestration, product order
orchestration, and service order orchestration
design
9. real time portal and dashboard design
To provide Business retail and wholesale
customers the ability to research, configure,
order, upgrade and view network services in near
real-time and presenting these capabilities to
internal service provider users via a role based
user interface that may be accessed from a
multitude of digital devices, including desktops,
laptops, smartphones and tablets, as well as via
an app (device agnostic).
These portals will:
• Give customers direct control over their
network services without having to go
through an intermediary (e.g., a sales agent).
• Deliver customer service requests within
hours.
• Offer these capabilities in a simplified
manner for self-service ordering through an
easy to use user interface to design
customized services by dragging and
dropping service components.
10. deployment and execution
•
•
Governance plan execution
Application onboarding
11. Solutions management
•
•
•
•
Managing the solutions and infrastructure life-cycle
Operations support and training
Systems Integration
On-going security assessment
12. training and staff augmentation
•
•
SDN and NFV training: Including technology, architecture models, vendor products, roadmap,
standards, interfaces, interoperability with legacy, orchestration, services, data center,
virtual mobile, virtual IMS, and virtual optical networks.
Staff augmentation
summary
Ericsson firmly believes its SDN and NFV approach will:
• Remove service provider speculation on the
total cost of ownership through its cost
analysis and modeling tools and services
• Eliminate operations uncertainties in terms
of scalability, reliability, and performance
• Clarify virtualization software and opex costs
in the longer term and highlights the added
costs that CSPs will incur if they do not
employ a holistic service agility framework
when moving towards network virtualization.
• Identify critical risks and success factor is
the evolution of the OSS layer to orchestrate
the design, create, and manage services.
• Provide guidance on how to evolve their
OSS/BSS environment to support virtual next
generation infrastructure.
• Help service providers to develop OSS
strategies for virtual infrastructure that can
support the coexistence of traditional physical
networks and virtualized networks as well as
the existing OSS/BSS systems.
Please contact your Ericsson Sales
Representative or email the NFV/SDN
Consulting group at:
NFV&[email protected]
• Guide service providers in building new OSS
architecture which is cheaper, more agile and
automated, matching the flexibility and
elasticity of a virtualized network.
• Help service provider innovate and evolve
their processes and design and implement
open solutions that allow service providers
to continue using or extending their existing
processes and systems, thus maximizing the
return on their investment while ensuring
minimal disruption to operations and
customer services
• Enable the service provider to achieve service
agility, operational flexibility and optimization
of costs.
• Provide ongoing support of transformation
efforts employing the latest technologies and
strategies.
• Ericsson is one of the few companies with a
full spectrum of OSS fulfillment and
assurance products engaged in thousands
of successful OSS/BSS implementation,
deployment, integration, and migration
helping service providers to accelerate the
design, creation, delivery and management
of services.
© Ericsson AB 2014. The content of this document is subject to revision without notice due to continued progress in methodology, design and
manufacturing. Ericsson shall have no liability for any error or damage of any kind resulting from the use of this document.

Download Report