The Blue Planet platform's ongoing automation journey

Vodafone UK is one operator that has recently chosen Ciena's Blue Planet for the management of its optical and IP networks. An interview with Ciena to understand what the Blue Planet network automation tool does.

Having some knowledge of a telco's operations helps in understanding the role of a network automation platform. So says Kevin Wade, senior director and product marketing team leader at Ciena Blue Planet.

Source: Ciena

Service providers, like any business, have an operational infrastructure that begins with business processes. For a service provider, the process starts with a connectivity service request. The business processes capture the customer's order and deliver the requested service.

Once up and running, the service must be monitored and managed to ensure the service level agreement is upheld.

"Today, these processes are highly manual," says Wade. "Automation is being looked at and deployed more extensively to simplify these processes."

Blue Planet's evolution

Blue Planet's capabilities have expanded considerably since Ciena bought the platform from Cyan in 2015. Then, it was an orchestration tool for network functions virtualisation (NFV).

Kevin WadeThe platform now addresses automated operations or, as the company describes it, closed-loop service-life-cycle automation.

Ciena bought three companies between 2018-19 to bolster the Blue Planet platform.

Packet Design, its first acquisition, provides Layer 3 automation. Cyan, like Ciena, was a packet-optical company so Blue Planet addressed up to Layer 2. "Layer 3 is where the real intelligence is in the network," says Wade.

Packet Design's expertise is in route optimisation, understanding the Layer 3 network's real-time topology and determining the best provisioned dynamic paths using multiprotocol label switching (MPLS).

An issue impacting network automation is that operators may be ignorant of all the equipment they have deployed. Given the long deployment histories, operators can lose track of equipment in their networks. "It's like running a store and not knowing what you have in the back room," says Wade.

To this aim, Ciena bought DonRiver which developed a tool that maps the elements making up the network and reveals their relationship to the services. This is now Blue Planet's Inventory product (see diagram).

The tool has a 'federation engine' that collects network data. The engine uncovers relationships between network components and the topology, including items such as patch panels and cables, and relates the services to the topology.

"This [capability] is outside the closed-loop automation process but is critical to help customers accelerate the automation journey," says Wade.

The third and final acquisition, and the most important in expanding Blue Planet's capabilities, is Centina Systems which brings assurance expertise.

"Assurance ensures that a service is provisioned correctly and monitored in real-time using information from across the multi-domain, multi-layer network," says Wade. This capability helps network operations centre staff fix faults.

Collectively, the capabilities help operators understand what is deployed so they can automate, implement automated service activation from Layers 0-3, and assure the automated services in a continuous and closed-loop manner, says Wade.

Modular platform

Ciena is a member of the Linux Foundation Networking's Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) initiative. ONAP is an open-source project developing an orchestration, management and automation platform for network services.

By joining the open-source initiative, Ciena can pick ONAP components and integrate them with its software. "We support it [a component], enhance it, and integrate it with Blue Planet," says Wade.

Ciena worked on and integrated ONAP's policy engine within Blue Planet which has since been deployed by a service provider customer active in ONAP.

The service provider suggested Ciena's policy-engine enhancements would be valuable to the ONAP open-source community. Ciena worked with the operator to take control of the policy engine before contributing it back to the community. The resulting policy engine is now a component of Blue Planet and ONAP.

"It is interchangeable between the two," says Wade. "That is the concept operators are looking for across all the software components implemented in their stack; they want it modularised."

Ciena is making other modules available to operators aside from the policy engine. These include its Layer-3 path computation engine (PCE) and what it calls its 'discovery layer'.

When Blue Planet automates a service, it drills down to the multi-vendor network management systems or software-define networking (SDN) controllers. "As a functional block, this is a discovery layer," says Wade. "Customers have requested we make this module available."

Wade says that the larger operators have more developer staff to integrate individual components: "Some operators are interested in buying certain high-value functions inside Blue Planet as standalone components."

Service provider customers

Ciena has over 200 Blue Planet customers including 15 tier-1 service providers.

Vodafone UK, for example, is introducing a transport domain orchestrator and is using Blue Planet as the first step towards end-to-end automation.

Hector Silva

Telefonica Deutschland announced last year that it had chosen Ciena's software for its network upgrade as part of its iFusion programme. This includes SDN and a multi-vendor transport network.

Hector Silva, CTO and strategic sales leader for CALA at Ciena, says Telefonica Deutschland selected Blue Planet for its support of open standard models such as the transport application programming interface (T-API) and OpenConfig.

"Operators have to have everything standardised, supporting the OpenConfig and T-API models; that is a direction they want to go," says Silva. "But Blue Planet also has the flexibility to support legacy interfaces."

The Telefonica architecture uses a hierarchical SDN approach. At the lower level are various vendors' equipment above which reside SDN domain controllers that are typically vendor specific. And above that is the Blue Planet platform.

"Blue Planet communicates to the domain controllers or directly to the equipment," says Silva. "The vision is to have those interfaces and the models standardised."

Blue Planet abstracts that complexity underneath so that the services connected to Ciena's software see a consistent service definition end-to-end. "This is regardless of the mix of vendors and systems," says Silva.

Blue Planet exposes the information to the operations system support (OSS) above it. "This becomes a point of entry for assurance and inventory such that all these resources are consolidated in a single application programming interface (API)," says Silva.

Dish Network is another service provider that is using Blue Planet. In particular, the Blue Planet Inventory tool and the service order management that helps automate the processing of service orders.

Dish is getting ready for 5G network slicing and both tools are helping the operator. "Quickly processing a customer order is part of network slicing; the idea of changing and modifying on-demand," he says.

Colt Technology Services is another operator that has trialled Blue Planet's Proactive Network Operations (PNO) tool. The tool uses machine-learning techniques to predict faults in the network so they can be addressed before the fault occurs.

“Proactive Network Operations helps providers not only predict unplanned outages with extraordinary accuracy – up to 95 per cent – but also avoid them,” says Wade. Using such automation and artificial intelligence capabilities, Proactive Network Operations save providers on average some 38 per cent in ‘trouble-to-resolve’ operational expenses a year.

Wade says Colt is using the tool in an open-loop manner with staff assessing the machine-learning algorithm's recommendations.

Closed-loop control may happen for certain alarms but staff are likely to be involved awhile yet.