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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
Source: Dorado Software
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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
Source: Dorado Software
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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
Source: Dorado Software
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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.
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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."