Guaranteeing Service Assurance in NFV

Transcription

1 Guaranteeing Service Assurance in NFV WHITE PAPER FEBRUARY 2017

2 White Paper: Guaranteeing Service Assurance in NFV NFV comes with great promises Legacy networks are notoriously difficult to modify or upgrade since physical hardware is expensive, proprietary and inflexible. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) proposes a fundamental new way to define, create and manage a network by replacing dedicated network hardware with software & automation. There is no doubt about CSPs moving forward with NFV but it s likely to take a decade, and likely to happen in steps rather than as a rip-and-replace of the infrastructure. IHS Markit forecasts that the NFV market will be worth $15.5 billion by 2020 and that the NFV market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 42 percent between 2015 and from $2.7 billion in 2015 to 15.5 billion in NFV s value proposition is overwhelming: Increased network flexibility, scalability & reliability 33% vims net cost savings Automated provisioning of network applications and associated sustainable OPEX reductions Improved and on-demand service deployment 45% net less capex 75% from improved capacity planning 25% from faster and cheaper VNF creation and upgrades on COTS VNI 25% from improved service assurance T2R and O&M 17% from reduced customer complaints 10% net less opex 28% from automated service fulfillment inventory and optimisation 30% from data centre cost savings Direct CAPEX savings through the use of COTS hardware: 1. Reduction in hardware, rack space and power consumption 2. Reuse of a shared pool of hardware resources for various functions to meet elastic capacity needs - 2 -

3 but also with big challenges NFV is a disruptive technology for network design and service delivery. It introduces new risks because it adds additional layers of complexity, which need to be tracked and managed. Impact on the customer experience Within NFV, new services and capacity requirements can be changed on the fly to meet demand, but are quite risky to subscriber s QoE if managed incorrectly. To avoid the risk of service disruptions and bad customer experience when moving to a software-based network architecture, providing a good service assurance should not be overlooked. NFV standardization provides already the integration of automatic active end-to-end testing in the workflows of new services implementation. However, this type of automation only provides a minimum guarantee that the network service is properly instantiated and works within the predefined configurations. It does not measure the impact on the customer experience. Having a good way to test and validate is therefore paramount. According to an Analysys Mason s report of February 2015, mobile operators can for instance achieve 33% net savings by implementing a vims for VoLTE, 45% in net capex savings and 10 in net opex savings. Increased complexity The introduction of a virtual infrastructure with an orchestrator that automates the introduction of new network functions brings a real complexity to network management. CSPs need to understand which of the decisions triggers automation and how to measure their impact. Additionally, these virtual network functions must integrate perfectly well with physical network functions. So, new solutions will be necessary to help CSPs manage service assurance in this context of hybrid networks. Organizational transformation NFV requires an organizational transformation since it implies a shift towards IT. Network engineers and support teams that are used to working with physical infrastructure will need to adapt their skills and competences, redesign existing processes and methods and manage new tools to enable the organization to migrate effectively and seamlessly to virtualization

4 White Paper: Guaranteeing Service Assurance in NFV Service Assurance is business critical Maintaining subscriber experience is a major challenge especially with the rapid growth of rich media applications and exploding network traffic. According to Analysys Mason churn in mature markets is as high as 24%, so there is a real need to react to customer issues in real-time, or even better, to proactively move on the issue before customer realizes there is one. Service assurance is an area of great importance and should be an integral part of service delivery, in a physical and virtualized environment. Relevance of network probes Monitoring and optimizing performance in a virtualized environment is more challenging. It complicates the implementation of probes since the monitored interfaces can potentially be virtual (East-West interfaces). Instantiation of vprobes A second difficulty is linked to the network orchestrator which can, under certain conditions, decide to modify network configuration by moving, deleting or adding new network nodes and hence add or remove virtual links. To cope with this network elasticity, probes are going virtualas well. Monitoring solutions hence become themselves a VNF as part of the virtual network. In this case probes are instantiated by the orchestrator at the same time as network creation. Though, at this moment, standards which describe how to duplicate network flows towards monitoring solutions when creating of a new network service aren t availble yet. Flow duplication Astellia therefore proposes the integration of a TAP Manager application in its monitoring solution which detects any change in the network and instructs the network controller to duplicate the relevant flows to virtual probes. Astellia s Network Topology Manager can detect if a new VM instance has been launched for a new VNF and can then reconfigure its monitoring solution to instantiate a new vprobe and reconfigure the tapping to monitor this new VNF. Another component Astellia offers is a VNF Manager that takes care of the health of the monitoring solution and is in charge of automatically starting a new vprobe in case of failure or auto-scaling the system by deploying additional vprobes when processing requirements increase. Provisioning vprobes VNF manager equipment Orchestrator VNF manager monitoring 5 TAP manager 6 Analytics VNF 1 VNF 2 VNF Virtual infrastructure manager Network manager Virtual infrastructure Network infrastructure - 4 -

5 Key role of advanced analytics The innovations brought by NFV offer also new ways of monitoring, focusing for example on key interfaces to quickly identify faulty network equipment. Software probes can then be instantiated on demand to ensure a more precise diagnosis in order to resolve the most complex problems. It s inevitable that NFV will create a challenging environment for maintaining a consistent QoE. Network analytics will therefore play a key role in managing service assurance in NFV networks. They provide tangible insights and enable proactive decision-making needed to improve customer s experience, reduce network downtime, optimize network planning and reduce costs. Analytics are critical to offer for instance real-time intelligence to dynamically scale resources to cope with unexpected changes in network traffic. Analytics solutions should therefore combine different sources of information: vprobes, OSS counters, active testing, NetFlow, virtual infrastructure counters and orchestration orders. Alarms OSS Monitoring E2E Services Root cause analysis Troubleshooting Active testing Analysis & Analytics Collection layer vprobes NetFlow Service quality demarcation Correction recommendation Virtual infra Orchestration In the near future, analytics will directly feed actionable intelligence decisions to the orchestrator by combining information on the functioning of VNF, service performance and customer experience. Analytics can bring this subscriber insight to the orchestrator and trigger subscriber-centric actions, for instance propose rules to better serve VIP subscribers in congested areas. Actions 1. The orchestrator books resources at the Virtual Infrastructure Manager 2. The orchestrator asks the VNF manager to provision VNFs 3. The orchestrator asks to provision a monitoring solution on the same pop 4. The orchestrator provisions network resources for interconnecting VNFs 5. The orchestrator notifies 6. Decisions based on the TAP Manager that analytics are fed into the the network topology has orchestrator changed - the TAP manager collects topology information - the TAP manager provisions flow duplication rules to forward and tunnels traffic to be monitored to the vprobe - 5 -

6 White Paper: Guaranteeing Service Assurance in NFV Astellia s 3 must-follow guidelines for NFV Service Assurance 1. Monitor the network in real-time with vprobes Not all network functions will be virtualized and migration to a virtual infrastructure will be a gradual process. Maintaining an end-to-end visibility, both within virtual infrastructure as well as across hybrid physical and virtual environments, is vital to guarantee subscribers do not experience anything less than the best performance on the network. Astellia recommends the use of vprobes to monitor physical and VM-to-VM communications and ensure a real-time view of the entire network environment to predict network problems and put processes in place to ensure that high value customers consistently receive a good QoE. It is crucial to monitor and compare QoE trends before and after the migration towards NFV. Astellia guarantees a seamless migration by depicting the same KPIs in the same graphical user interface to quantify gains or gaps in QoE. 2. Implement Service Assurance based on analytics E2E issues demarcation, fault isolation and root cause analysis make service quality management more efficient. Issue demarcation is an automatic diagnosis based on machine learning algorythms which provides a list of probable failure causes. Astellia s analytic solution, backed-up by a holistic and proven portfolio of professional services, integrates key metrics from network infrastructures and VNF, allowing for a complete consolidated vision and control of virtualized networks 3. Partner with the right solution provider For the last two years, Astellia has been working on its solution to address current and future challenges of NFV. Its new vprobes, compatible with the most important standards of the cloud, allow easy implementation and integration in a virtual platform. In its short term roadmap, Astellia proposes an integration of its entire solution in a fully orchestrated network. There is industry consensus that service assurance cannot be an afterthought when it comes to the operationalisation of NFV/SDN based virtual networks. As more parts of the network become virtualised, CSPs will need new assurance approaches and innovative technologies such as vprobes to monitor and assure services in the NFV domain. Equally important will be the ability of such a solution to dynamically self-adapt and reconfigure to the changing network conditions. In this market context, Astellia s development of the orchestrated virtual probes is important, and strongly positions the company as an innovator in service assurance for NFV/SDN. Anil RAO Senior Analyst at Analysys Mason - 6 -

7 Astellia s Service Assurance solution BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MONITORING & TROUBLESHOOTING NETWORK OPTIMIZATION Network - Service - Customer DATA LAKE DATA ACQUISITION: vprobes, probes, call traces, CRM, billing, etc. HYBRID MOBILE NETWORK: RAN + CORE Astellia s real-time Nova monitoring and troubleshooting solution for multi-vendor hybrid mobile networks brings unique business intelligence to reduce OPEX and CAPEX, optimize end-to-end network performance, service quality and enhance subscriber satisfaction. Nova meets requirements of network operations, service operations, customer care and marketing teams. Nova provides operators with capabilities to detect, correlate, analyze, report and troubleshoot issues related to network performance, handset behavior and subscriber usage. Astellia s vprobe Astellia s vprobe delivers the same high value information as its physical probes, using the same core software and DPI technology while being adapted to a virtual environment through the integration of a new capture layer based on DPDK libraries and high precision soft timestamping functions. Astellia s dimensioning model allows to calculate very precisely the resources needed for the vprobe (CPU, RAM, storage IOPS, storage capacity and network bandwidth) based on throughput requirements and details of the deployment site. The table below illustrates the typical resources required by a vprobe for Core LTE interface monitoring. Interfaces: S1-C, S6a, S11, S10, S5/S8, Gn-Core, Gn-Mobility The dimensioning model is automated in an Astellia management module that resizes the monitoring solution upon the topology of customer deployment vprobe (Neptune) Input deployment requirements # Vcpu@ 2.6 GHz RAM (GB) Storage size (TB) Storage IOPS Output BW (MB/s) Minimal configuration: 100 Mbps Control Plane (7 days of history)

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