Rapid Mpls

White Paper

Enhancing Customer Experience

Through Rapid MPLS Provisioning

Prepared by

Caroline Chappell

Senior Analysts, Heavy Reading

www.heavyreading.com

On behalf of

www.doradosoftware.com

March 2013

http://www.heavyreading.com/

http://www.doradosoftware.com/

HEAVY READING | MARCH 2013 | WHITE PAPER | ENHANCING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH RAPID MPLS PROVISIONING 2

Introduction Enterprises around the world are flocking to IP/MPLS services, attracted by their

flexibility, cost and opportunity for service convergence. The ability to provision

IP/MPLS services rapidly and efficiently is becoming a core service provider

competency and market differentiator. Advanced communications service

providers (CSPs) no longer view MPLS provisioning as a back-end engineering

function but as a key means of enabling their customers' business.

The MPLS VPN market is highly competitive and enterprise customers are becom-

ing more demanding, influenced by their experience of provisioning compute

resources in the cloud. As a result, CSPs that offer the best customer experience of

network provisioning will win business. This means providing timely and accurate service delivery and self-service access so that customers can monitor their

services and turn them up and down on demand.

CSPs face numerous challenges in fulfilling MPLS services efficiently using current

tools and approaches. Today, many CSPs manually configure large numbers of

boxes, both in the network and at the customer premise, using many different

tools and interfaces in a typical multi-vendor network. Separate provisioning and

assurance systems can leave the network in an inconsistent state and few CSPs

are able to expose their networks to support customer self-service consumption.

Yet CSPs don't want to rip and replace stable, established processes and tools.

This white paper discusses a network abstraction and automation approach that

makes it easier to configure equipment without having to engage with low-level

interfaces to each box. This approach works with CSPs' existing tools and processes

and presents the network in a more programmable manner to speed service

fulfillment and enable customers to monitor and change services on demand.

Critical to the success of this approach is a rich abstraction of the network and the

way in which this abstraction and orchestration layer can quickly be aligned with

a CSP's current product catalogs and order to cash workflows. Tight integration

with service assurance enables automated "closed loop" remediation of issues

caused by configuration errors or demand-based provisioning.

Section II analyzes the drivers for IP/MPLS services worldwide and therefore for a

more effective and timely means of provisioning them to ensure competitive

differentiation. It outlines the limitations of current tools and approaches.

Section III expands on the requirements for a next-generation provisioning

platform around abstraction, automation, orchestration and exposure. It looks at

the ways in which such a platform can insulate CSPs from network change in the

future, including the introduction of new software-defined networking (SDN)

architectures and protocols.

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Streamlining MPLS Provisioning

MPLS Provisioning Is Critical to Enterprise Customer Enablement

In a globalizing economy, enterprises are steadily moving away from private

circuits towards IP/MPLS-based services. The advantages of MPLS-based IP/VPNs

(Layer 2, Layer 3 and VPLS) are many. They include topological flexibility – the

ability to support resilient, multi-point connections across geographies – service

convergence (voice and data services over the same network) and lower cost for

higher capacity bandwidth compared to leased lines. The managed aspect of

MPLS-based services is also an attraction, enabling enterprises to focus on their

core business without being distracted by the complexity of their networks.

For those enterprises beginning to place workloads into CSPs' public clouds on a

regular and/or cloud bursting basis, Ethernet over MPLS is fast becoming the

connectivity service of choice. Heavy Reading research finds that all leading CSPs

providing cloud services either have enabled, or plan to enable in the very near

future, the linking of enterprise customers' MPLS IP/VPNs with virtual LANs in their

public clouds. Such CSPs are therefore able to create a virtual private cloud for

each enterprise customer that leverages the security and quality of service

characteristics inherent in the MPLS network. MPLS is key to a CSP's ability to deliver

a cloud experience superior to that available from non-network owning public

cloud providers.

For all these reasons, operators continue to report significant growth in MPLS

IP/VPN demand, with emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and Asia begin-

ning to see particularly high levels of interest. Around the world, CSPs are extend-

ing their MPLS footprints both in-country to increase capillarity and through

network-to-network Interfaces NNIs with partners to serve multinational customers.

The ability to provision IP/MPLS services rapidly and efficiently is becoming a core

CSP competency and market differentiator. The MPLS market is highly competitive

and enterprise customers are becoming more demanding, influenced by their

experience of the cloud and the forces of IT consumerization. When enterprises

can bring new virtual servers online in a matter of minutes, they are no longer

willing to wait weeks for MPLS IP/VPNs to be provisioned or for change requests for

more bandwidth or a different quality of service (QoS) profile to be actioned.

Enterprise customers increasingly want to consume the network on demand and

to carry out simple provisioning and reprovisioning activities in a self-service model.

In short, enterprises want a better experience of MPLS service delivery than they

have received to date. This means that CSPs can no longer afford to regard MPLS

provisioning as merely another engineering function. Instead, advanced CSPs

view provisioning efficiency as a key means of enabling enterprise customers to

meet their business requirements in a timely, cost-effective manner. Those CSPs

that can respond to enterprise expectations of, and requirements for, rapid

provisioning timescales and self-service will win business.

MPLS Provisioning Challenges in a Multi-Vendor Environment

CSPs seeking to transform their MPLS provisioning process to accelerate service

delivery and support a self-service consumption model face a number of chal-

lenges. MPLS provisioning is hampered by:

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The sheer number of boxes that have to be provisioned. Setting up VPNs

may require the configuration of multiple tens of boxes from a variety of

vendors. Ensuring configuration accuracy across every component to the

specific requirements of individual customers is a complex, time-

consuming and tedious task. It also limits the scope of services CSPs can

offer and the number of clients requests they can handle.

The need to orchestrate provisioning using tools/interfaces from multiple

vendors. Linked to the first point is the fact that CSPs often use the provi-

sioning tools native to each vendor's equipment. These tools have differ-

ent interfaces and their own sets of CLIs. Network engineers/operations

staff need to be deeply familiar with each tool, which adds cost to the

provisioning process as well as time as they switch between tools.

The manual nature of the process. Manual manipulation of CLIs is labor-

intensive, slow and prone to error. Misconfigurations result in lost revenue

and customer dissatisfaction, while provisioning delay increasingly means

lost business as customers turn to operators that can deliver services faster.

Manual IP/VPN configuration is a large operating cost for CSPs that con-

tributes significantly to the total cost of providing MPLS-based services.

A discontinuity with assurance. Many CSPs have separate provisioning

and assurance systems which can't talk to one another. This can lead to

problems in ensuring equipment is correctly and consistently configured,

since each system has its own view of the state of the network. But it also

means valuable time is lost in detecting service performance/SLA issues and reprovisioning equipment to resolve them. CSPs without an integrat-

ed provisioning/assurance capability can't support "lights out" near real-

time changes to services, for example, enabling VPN structures to be

modified based on schedules, loads or QoS indicators. The dynamic ad-

aptation of services is becoming an increasingly important use case as

CSPs seek to improve customer experience, enable advanced customer

service requirements and ultimately optimize bandwidth utilization.

Poor control over CPE. The configuration and change management of

large numbers of highly distributed customer premise equipment is a key

part of the MPLS provisioning process. However, CSPs often struggle to

manage the process seamlessly end-to-end, both within the network and

out at the customer edge. Without rigorous remote CPE management

capabilities, CSPs find it difficult to reduce the costs associated with CPE

misconfigurations and truck rolls, increase the speed of new service deliv-

ery and enhance customer experience.

Lack of a secure high level interface which would give customers and

partners a collaborative, real-time view of the provisioned state of their

networks – both CPE and services – and the ability to change configura-

tions/scale bandwidth for themselves. As the cloud delivery model gains

momentum, customers and partners will increasingly want access on de-

mand to network information and provisioning tools. Current MPLS provi-

sioning tools and methods can typically only be used by internal, specialist

staff, usually in a single organization.

CSPs value the stability of their existing MPLS provisioning tools and processes.

However, they acknowledge the need to streamline and improve their provision-

ing capability to serve enterprise customers more effectively. They need any new

approach to work incrementally with the old, without having to rip and replace

operational systems that are already in place.


Transforming the Customer Experience of MPLS

Provisioning: Next-Generation Requirements &

Capabilities

New MPLS Provisioning Requirements

In order to transform MPLS provisioning from a time-consuming and labor-intensive

engineering function to one that is highly flexible and responsive to customer

needs, CSPs need to address four key issues:

Speed: dramatically reducing the time taken to configure the network for

the services and specific treatments required by each customer

Cost: significantly lowering the opex associated with turning on, maintain-

ing and changing MPLS-based services

Customer access: going beyond providing visibility of key service metrics

to enabling self-service creation and modification of services on-demand

Feature exploitation: providing the richest possible access to existing and

new service capabilities, and security parameters, and IPv6 support, while

minimizing the complexity associated with managing a rich set of service

features.

These requirements imply a new approach to MPLS provisioning. The basic

capabilities critical to tackling CSPs' current set of challenges are:

Abstraction of the complex IP/MPLS landscape, including both multi-

vendor network equipment and the individual OSS used to manage each

equipment type

Automation of the work orders associated with configuring and activating

specific services over varied network equipment

Orchestration of these work orders into an end-to-end, customer-specific

process for configuring MPLS-based services and validation that the pro-

cess has completed successfully

Exposure of high level provisioning capabilities to customers through APIs

and/or a customer portal, enabling customer-centric provisioning and

collaboration.

Advanced capabilities may additionally be required to support sophisticated

customer demands and to future-proof CSPs against network architecture

changes as a result of the industry trend towards software-defined networking:

Autonomic automation, the ability to reprovision services automatically

and/or change parameters based on network conditions/thresholds/rules

and/or customer-defined policies

Extensibility to support different modes of provisioning physical and soft-

ware-defined network elements that will support IP/VPNs in the future.

Most operators will have to manage a hybrid network environment which

is likely to persist for many years.


Abstraction: The Key to IP/MPLS Programmability

Many operators have a complex, multivendor environment underpinning their

IP/MPLS services. Even in a single-vendor environment, being able to configure

equipment at a higher level of abstraction, rather than engaging with low-level

interfaces to each box, is critical to the faster provisioning of services.

Figure 1: The Evolution of MPLS Provisioning

Source: Heavy Reading


The capabilities of individual vendors' network equipment need to be represented

in an abstract way. This white paper describes a layered approach to network

abstraction based on service templates and work orders.

Going from the bottom up, each network equipment type needs an associated

device service template that maps to the specific functions that can be accessed

and programmed within it. These models will be technically detailed, reflecting

the very large number of variables that can be provisioned in the equipment.

Device service template concepts are often present in vendor-specific network/

element management systems for different types of network equipment.

At a higher level of abstraction, the set of vendor-specific device service tem-

plates need to be aggregated into common service templates so that function

that is similar to all vendors' equipment is represented in a unified, consistent way.

This reduces the complexity associated with the low-level view of equipment

functions. However, the common service templates need to be rich enough to

reflect the range of capabilities present in the CSP's environment or the CSP may

be constrained in how it can respond to customer requirements.

The common service templates contain the definitions of all the typical IP/MPLS

services available in the CSP's environment – Layer 2 VPNs, Layer 3 VPNs, P2P,

P2MP, VPLS and so on. The mapping between the two levels of template ensures

that each service is related to the network equipment types that support it, including customer premise equipment (CPE) since services have to be provi-

sioned end-to-end, and to the equipment functions that can be set to deliver

customer-specific service treatments.

The common service templates allow network engineers/operations staff to set

up/change services, configure network functions and apply treatments. The

common service templates can establish default values for any specific conditions

that need to be pushed down to the network, a proportion of which may not

require changing to fulfill a particular customer's order. This significantly cuts the

time taken to configure a service. The high level visual interface provided by the

template also contributes to higher productivity compared with manipulating low-

level scripts.

Finally a layer of operational abstraction can be added that maps the common

service templates to the service provider's product catalog (business) view of

services and the organization-specific processes used to fulfill them. This allows

service providers to retain their unique descriptions of services and to continue to

capture service orders and process them in existing ways. Operational abstraction

is realized through work orders that augment the services described in the service

model with organization-specific information such as order numbers and other

attributes. Work orders provide the bridge between a service provider's existing

order capture and fulfillment processes and the abstraction that aids faster,

consistent and automated service configuration provided by a next-generation

provisioning tool.

The work orders and common service templates can be made accessible to the

CSP's existing OSS. This means that CSPs don't have to rip out and replace their

investment in stable tools – they can simply augment these with the further

benefits of higher-level abstraction. For example, it is easier to add new function

once at common service template level than it is to extend individual tools each

of which has its own view of data. CSPs should check that a vendor's common

data model supports key next-generation functions, such as IPv6 out of the box.


The ability to extend the abstraction layer(s) to reflect new functionality intro-

duced by equipment vendors and new service capabilities is important. The

templates should be extensible at each level of abstraction. In addition, the CSP

should be able to move easily between layers of abstraction for operational

efficiency and flexibility. For example, a customer may want a service with six

endpoints, instead of the four endpoints captured in a standard work order. The

CSP should be able to augment the work order with specific common service

templates to meet this requirement.

By abstracting equipment-specific function into higher-level, "software-defined"

work orders, common service templates and device service templates facilitate

the "programming" of the IP/MPLS environment. Abstraction enables CSPs to

realize many of the benefits of SDN today – for example, rapid configurability of

the network – in advance of more radical changes to network infrastructure.

Automation & Orchestration: Accelerating Time-to-Configure

Automation and orchestration are very closely linked to abstraction. Once the

environment has been abstracted into a series of work orders, common service

templates and device service templates/device drivers, it is easy to drive the

automatic configuration of network functions in each piece of equipment

needed to support a service.

Work orders use the default and customized fields in a common service template

to instruct the device-specific templates to apply the right variables to the right

pieces of equipment associated with a service. Work orders themselves can be

triggered manually or automatically by higher-level processes.

Such "software-defined" provisioning is much faster than manually provisioning

each box – including highly distributed CPE – at CLI level. Once a connection has

Figure 2: Network Abstraction Layers Support Rapid Provisioning

Source: Dorado Software


been set up physically, the equipment involved can be configured in a matter of

minutes rather than the weeks required to provision services manually.

Each service template is a step in an end-to-end provisioning process, across the

network and out to the customer premise, which the provisioning system needs to

orchestrate to a successful conclusion. The provisioning system will need a means

of tracking all the common and device service templates associated with a work

order, visualizing and validating each service activation step to ensure that it is

applied successfully,

Automation enforces consistency and reduces errors. Orchestration ensures that

devices are configured in the correct order, and that activation activities are

carried out in parallel where appropriate. Orchestration reduces mistakes that

might otherwise result in unnecessary truck rolls and significantly accelerates time-

to-configure by enabling multiple boxes to be configured at the same time.

Exposure: Enabling Customer Self-Service

A key advantage of abstraction is that it can be taken to any level. A CSP's

network operations staff can manipulate device drivers at a low level to ensure

they stay in step with the latest capabilities of the network and market demands.

Internally, network staff can use richly detailed common service or device service

templates to provision highly customized services on behalf of customers.

However, as customers increasingly want to consume the network in a cloud-like

model, on demand, abstraction can usefully be deployed to create high level

work orders that are simpler for customers to interact with. Work orders can be

exposed to customers through a portal or as Web services for automated use.

Exposure enables customers or their applications to configure certain aspects of

their services themselves as and when they need them.

Figure 3: Customizing Abstraction Layers to Individual CSP Needs



CSPs can use the exposure layer to give customers and other partners real-time,

secure visibility of the configured state of all equipment associated with their

service(s). This supports and encourages collaborative management of the

network and is the foundation for providing bandwidth on demand.

Self-service consumption of MPLS-based services not only increases customer

stickiness and satisfaction, it can further drive down the cost of provisioning and

push up revenues by making it easier for customers to get access to additional,

chargeable service capabilities.

Autonomic Automation

Heavy Reading sees a clear trend towards further automation of operational

processes using contextual intelligence and insights gained from the network itself.

Such automation is "autonomic" because processes make their own (autonomous

and without human intervention) decisions about how, when and where to act

based on insight-driven policies. Autonomically automated processes are also

referred to as "closed loop" processes.

For example, events detected by monitoring systems which may affect the

performance, security or resilience of customer services will, in future, automatical-

ly and proactively trigger policies; these, in turn, will drive actions in the provision-

ing system to mitigate any impact on individual customer service-level agree-

ments (SLAs). Or customers may wish temporarily to consume more bandwidth

based on a particular schedule or event that can be programmed in advance

and then automatically acted upon by the provisioning system.

This trend is driving the convergence of provisioning and assurance systems

responsible for performance monitoring and remediation. There are numerous

benefits from bringing these functions together: provisioning always has an up-to-

date view of network configurations courtesy of the monitoring system while the

Figure 4: Autonomic "Closed Loop" Reprovisioning



monitoring system can use the automated capabilities of the provisioning system

to rapidly reconfigure the network in the case of performance degradation or

other problems.

Real-time visibility of the network will be key here, since customers and partners will

want the reassurance of knowing that changes applied autonomically are

accurate and secure.

Future-Proofing Customer Experience of Provisioning

The programmable network is a concept that is closely linked with the latest

"buzzcronym" – SDN.* But Openflow and the radical re-architecting of the network

that SDN implies is not the only way to achieve network abstraction. CSPs have

enormous investments in their existing MPLS infrastructures, and these are not

going to disappear overnight. Even when CSPs start to incorporate Openflow or

equivalent structures into their networks, these are likely to run alongside traditional

equipment for some time.

CSPs will therefore need a high level of abstraction to provision customer services

across hybrid SDN/legacy infrastructure. CSPs will need to shield customers from

the migration process and to protect customers' service experience. A provision-

ing approach based on layers of abstraction will help CSPs future-proof them-

selves and their customers from the changes the market has in store.

* Light Reading's January 2013 SDN Symposium provides a useful introduction to

the concept of SDN.

Figure 5: Future-Proofing Provisioning Through Abstraction


https://presentations.inxpo.com/shows/ubm/Techweb/Lightreading/2-5-2013/registration/Registration.html?AffiliateKey=16060&AffiliateData=LREventPage


Conclusion MPLS-based services continue to be a major and growing source of revenue for

CSPs but MPLS provisioning is becoming a bottleneck. Current provisioning

practices, based on time-consuming, manual changes to individual pieces of

network equipment are out of step with the on-demand consumption models that

customers experience in other service delivery contexts.

In a rapidly-changing business environment, enterprise customers want to be able

to set up and change critical VPN services faster and, as far as possible, by

themselves, as and when they need them. They increasingly expect a far better

experience of MPLS service delivery than they have received to date. CSPs

urgently need to transform MPLS provisioning from an engineering task to a customer enablement solution – a function that helps enterprise customers meet

their business requirements in a timely, cost-effective way.

To achieve this goal, CSPs need to transform the speed, cost and manageability

of their provisioning process. An effective solution here will depend on four

capabilities:

Abstraction of the IP/MPLS environment so that it can be configured at a

higher level than individual boxes

Automated support for equipment configuration

Orchestration of the provisioning process end-to-end across the infrastruc-

ture

Exposure of provisioning functions at a high level to customers so that they

can do more for themselves.

The ability to provision rich VPN services in a differentiated way to meet the

requirements of individual customers has, for some time, been a key market driver

for CSPs. Now the race is on to optimize the MPLS provisioning process as CSPs

seek to establish a further level of competitive differentiation. CSPs that can

abstract and automate this process successfully will drive out the cost, time and

potential for customer dissatisfaction associated with error-prone, labor-intensive

manual configuration and/or the use of single vendor tools that provide only

limited access to the rich features available in the network. As a result, customers

will view CSPs as enabling partners in their business activities.

In conclusion, Heavy Reading believes that if CSPs adopt the powerful abstrac-

tion-based approach to MPLS provisioning outlined in this paper, they will not only

overcome the challenges that face them today. They will also future-proof

themselves against change resulting from the adoption of SDN-based network

technology. Just as an abstraction-based provisioning solution can interoperate

with a CSP's existing provisioning tools, so it should be able to integrate with SDN

controllers in the future and orchestrate these as part of an end-to-end provision-

ing process.

Transforming the MPLS provisioning process so that CSPs can respond as fast as

customers need them to is the new key to winning IP/VPN business.


About Dorado Dorado Software Inc. is a leading provider in resource management, assurance,

and service provisioning and activation in converged network environments.

Dorado Software's integrated suite of products, Redcell, lets operators configure,

deploy, and monitor their pool of network resources, in addition to dynamically

provision and monitor any IP service, including MPLS, MPLS video, and IPTV. By

combining resource and service management with monitoring, users have

complete service-oriented, operational visibility, and control over their entire

networked environment.

Redcell also features a unique social networking and collaboration platform, RC

Synergy, for building network operational communities across management system silos and with customer and partners, so work groups can share information

instantly, solve problems quickly, and deliver services faster. RC Synergy ignites

real-time problem diagnosis and provides a truly integrated, and highly customi-

zable, experience to quickly access both vital network and service information

from anywhere.

Additional Resources

Please visit Dorado Software's website at www.doradosoftware.com to learn more

about its resource management, assurance and service provisioning solutions. For

additional resources, download "Utilizing Community-Based Approach to Simplify

Cloud Management" and "Rethinking Service Assurance in the Age of the Cloud."

http://www.doradosoftware.com/

http://www.doradosoftware.com/products/registration/wp-cloud-management.html

http://www.doradosoftware.com/products/registration/wp-cloud-management.html

http://www.doradosoftware.com/products/registration/wp-service-assurance.html

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