Alcatel-Lucent 5650 User Manual

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Alcatel-Lucent 5650 User Manual

Alcatel-Lucent

5650 Control Plane

Assurance Manager

Extending IP/MPLS Management with Integrated Control Plane Management and Visibility

Overview

A significant portion of service failures, provisioning problems and troubleshooting delays can be directly attributed to control plane mis-configuration, undetected routing topology changes and the lack of simple tools that could be used to understand the control plane’s impact on services. These operational inefficiencies lead to a number of business problems for service providers.

They make it difficult to provide more consistent service delivery quality. They impact the ability to offer stricter service level agreements (SLAs) that can differentiate service offerings. And they make it impossible to cost-effectively scale Internet protocol/multi-protocol label switching (IP/MPLS) operations because network operators must rely on scarce IP routing experts to manually resolve Layer 2 and 3 service and MPLS infrastructure provisioning problems caused by the routing plane.

The Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager (CPAM) closes this gap in IP/MPLS management. It offers real-time control plane visualization, proactive control plane surveillance, configuration validation, and control plane diagnosis. In addition, by seamlessly integrating with the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM), the 5650 CPAM provides simplified diagnosis and intuitive visualization of the relationship between services, the MPLS infrastructure and the routing plane.

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Solving Control Plane Operational Issues with the 5650 CPAM

Service providers offering business critical services and delivery sensitive residential applications such as video can’t afford to let their customers down. Their reputation for consistent service delivery quality and adherence to SLAs is crucial. Since IP and MPLS provide the control plane technology that allows services to be rerouted around failures, leaving this critical technology unsupervised and manually operated can lead to unintended SLA violations. In addition, relying on scarce IP routing experts to provision and troubleshoot the MPLS infrastructure and services is not efficient for mainstream operations.

The Alcatel-Lucent 5650 CPAM offers routing architects and network operators an effective tool that can be used to isolate and resolve control plane problems, and understand the impact of control plane changes on services [Table 1].

The 5650 CPAM delivers this functionality based on real-time control plane information provided by the Alcatel-Lucent 7701 Control Plane Assurance Appliance (CPAA). The 7701 CPAA is a route listening and route processing hardware device that

non-intrusively participates in routing plane signaling. It is based on Alcatel-Lucent’s proven and evolving service router operating system (SR-OS).

Table 1. Solving Service Provider Issues with the 5650 CPAM

C U S TO M E R I S S U E

H O W T H E 5 6 5 0 C PA M A D D R E S S E S T H E I S S U E

Error-prone and time-consuming

Graphical control plane topology validation and diagnosis

manual verification of control plane

 

configuration and topology

 

 

 

Services are sometimes impacted by routing changes that are invisible to network operations

Lack of simple control plane tools integrated with service and network views impede network operators from resolving service/MPLS provisioning fall-outs and service failures related to the control plane; operators must rely on highlypaid and scarce IP routing resources

Proactive control plane surveillance and instant visualization of control plane, IP and MPLS path changes

5620 SAM SLA monitoring integrated with 5650 CPAM MPLS tunnel monitoring for instant impact analysis of tunnel changes on service delivery

Simple graphical representation of the control plane topology and diagnosis tools

5620 SAM service (Layer 2 and 3), MPLS tunnel and OAM trace overlay on the 5650 CPAM control plane topology view

B E N E F I T S

Accelerates verification and troubleshooting of the control plane and reduces service MTTR and ability to offer stricter SLAs

Proactive control plane change detection and impact analysis enables service providers to offer stricter service SLAs

Enables the service provider to costeffectively scale operations by enabling network operators to understand the relationship between service/tunnels and the control plane in order to resolve provisioning issues, without the help

of scarce IP experts

Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager 3

Re-Defining IP/MPLS Management

While IP/MPLS control plane protocols are crucial to enabling unprecedented cost-effectiveness for rerouting around failures, the majority of today’s management applications from other equipment vendors do not concern themselves with monitoring the operational state of the control plane, providing topology visualization or validating its configuration. The reason for this management gap is historical.

The first successful, large scale, IP-based networks were deployed to support residential high speed Internet (HSI) connectivity. This high volume, low cost, best-effort service did not warrant the need for sophisticated management software to track service SLAs. Aside from an emphasis on using IT methods to flexibly provision subscribers, IP operations for this type of network relied on low value element management systems (EMS) to configure and monitor basic infrastructure.

But the advent of mission critical business services and service delivery sensitive subscriber services such as video — all riding over an IP/MPLS infrastructure — has changed service providers’ management needs. Simplifying service provisioning, reducing MTTR and assuring a high quality of service has become paramount.

Alcatel-Lucent responded to this need by introducing comprehensive element, network and service management in one platform — the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service Aware Manager [Figure 2].

Figure 2. Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM Provides Element, Network and Service Management in ONE platform

Service Management

Managing

 

Customer Service

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Network Management

Managing Logically

5620 SAM

 

Linked Nodes

 

Element Management

 

 

 

 

Managing

 

 

Physical Hardware

 

 

 

 

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