Alcatel-Lucent 5650 User Manual

Alcatel-Lucent
5650 Control Plane
Assurance Manager

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

Overview

Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager2

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
impos sible to cost-effectively scale
Internet protocol/multi-protocol
label switching (IP/MPLS) opera ­tions 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 manage ­ment. It offers real-time control
plane visualization, proactive control
plane surveillance, configuration
validation, and control plane diag ­nosis. 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 infra ­structure and the routing plane.

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.

3Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager

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 archi ­tects and network operators an effective tool that can
be used to isolate and resolve control plane problems,
and under stand 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).

CUSTOMER ISSUE

Error-prone and time-consuming
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 inte ­grated with service and network views
impede network operators from resolv ­ing service/MPLS provisioning fall-outs
and service failures related to the control
plane; operators must rely on highly­paid and scarce IP routing resources

BENEFITS

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

HOW THE 5650 CPAM ADDRESSES THE ISSUE

Graphical control plane topology validation and diagnosis

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

Table 1. Solving Service Provider Issues with the 5650 CPAM

4 Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager

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 manage ­ment in one platform — the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service
Aware Manager [Figure 2].

Re-Defining IP/MPLS Management

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

Service Management

Network Management

Element Management

Managing

Customer Service

Managing Logically

Linked Nodes

Managing

Physical Hardware

5620 SAM