Virtualizing the network

Network and service topology discovery

The virtual network is an invisible network. It’s a connected set of software functions residing in COTS hardware located in data centers and customer locations. Furthermore, it is an ever-changing network that scales up or down depending on demand and is continuously optimizing itself to address service and network issues. Keeping track of network and service topology has never been an easy task, but in the virtual network, it’s even more challenging.

Many operations functions require detailed knowledge of network and service topologies, and an updated view of the active inventory, to run effectively. Everything from provisioning to troubleshooting requires a real-time view of the state of the network.

Real-time, automated topology mapping provides this critical solution by continually tracing the live topology to track changes as they happen. And for a network that will rely heavily on automation to drive operations efficiency, having an accurate, up-to-date view of the topology and inventory will be critical for activities like fault correlation or capacity reservation.

EXFO has the analytics and topology discovery tools you need to see into the invisible network.

How EXFO helps

Orchestrated service assurance

Automation will drive the virtual network. Simply put, manual operations will not be able to address the scale and complexity of virtual networks. A key aspect of automation is consistent, accurate and complete information to drive appropriate decisions, and this information will come from key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from most, if not all services in the virtual network.

Service management, in the virtual network, will be handled by end-to-end, NFV orchestrators, so it only makes sense that service activation testing and service assurance be included in this orchestration function. In this way, assurance becomes an aspect of the service rather than something that is applied afterwards, as an afterthought.

EXFO has the active and passive service testing and assurance solutions needed to give operators the visibility they need to build, operate and manage their virtual networks.

How EXFO Helps

Network analytics and machine learning

Millions of services, customer-controlled dynamic bandwidth allocation, DevOps driven development, constantly changing networks and service topologies: these are just some of the features that will account for the need for automated operations in virtual networks – automation that will require sophisticated analytics to support it.

Orchestrated service assurance will help provide the KPIs needed by these analytics engines, but leveraging analytics to proactively manage networks and services will also require sophisticated machine learning engines to discover hidden issues and trends in the sea of KPI data. Virtual networks have the potential to generate billions of KPIs per day. And making sense of this volume of data and looking for anomalies or trends is beyond human capability.

EXFO has analytics tools, including real-time topology mapping, to address the ever-changing virtual network and machine learning algorithms. EXFO can enable automated and proactive operations to provide better network insight.