http://www.ciena.com/Ciena_Insights_Blog.rss Ciena Blog Entries en-us Copyright 2016, Ciena Corporation Ciena Corporation en-us Copyright 2016, Ciena Corporation http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Programming-the-Network-And-You-Thought-Apps-were-Only-for-Smartphones.html Wed Sep 21 08:14:00 PDT 2016 Pictured above: Ciena's Anup Changaroth (far left), Willie Low (far right) and Rick Dodd (next to Willie) along with Team SP Avengers as they accept their award as winners of Ciena's ONIC Coding Competition. Fady Masoud is Senior Advisor for Technical Marketing within Ciena's Portfolio Solutions Group responsible for data center interconnect (DCI) solutions. He is co-author of the Experts Guide to OTN and brings 20 years of expertise and insights on architecture and requirements of next-gen optical platforms. Apps have become essential to our daily lives. We use them to manage our social life, get breaking news, hail a ride, and even manage the thermostat in our homes. But apps are not just for smartphones. The networks that connect those smartphones have apps too through software applications and tools that can open up new network features and functions faster than ever before, or correlate different network data sources for a better and more complete visibility of services run on the network. New application programming technology makes building apps for the network as easy as building apps for the smartphone. Data centers and the networks that connect them need apps too. Requirements for flexibility and programmability are increasing to accommodate new web-scale traffic demands. The latest technology breakthroughs that led to the creation of a new breed of data center interconnect (DCI) platforms also provide a new operational model for incorporating a high degree of programmability and open APIs -- bringing faster multi-platform/multi-vendor application development, easier integration with IT tools, and more efficient utilization of IT resources. Data center operators may leverage this new model by developing their own software applications based on their specific needs. Cloud-based application development portals started to become available, unlocking the potential of open APIs to simplify integration activities and develop new tools. Developers and IT teams can now develop new applications without investing in IT infrastructure or stressing IT budgets and resources. Much like a smartphone and its related application development environment, the application development portals can be used to design any application that leverages open APIs, such as apps for enhanced network visualization, fault event notification and capacity planning and trending, data center cluster management, or even detailed performance monitoring. Network App Development – Innovation is Endless These application development portals, such as Ciena's Emulation Cloud, allow developers to innovate, experiment, and test new service models on virtual network resources, resulting in dramatically lower entry and exit expenses. The portals also enable network and data center operators to leverage external development resources to scale and accelerate the development of software applications, emulate specific network configurations, model what-if scenarios, and overlay different information sources to create intelligent software tools that can help streamline operations, as depicted in the figure below. Development portals make programming easier and have inspired many companies, universities, research institutions and even high schools to host coding competitions. These competitions allow individuals and teams a unique experience to test their programming skills and app imagination. Ciena's Emulation Cloud App Coding Competition To inspire college students to create new apps for the Data Center Interconnect network, Ciena held a coding competition, The Optical Networking Innovation Competition (ONIC), in conjunction with SignAREN and KISTI. SignAREN (Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network) is Singapore's national research and education network. It is the sole provider of local and international networks dedicated to serving the research and education community in Singapore. KISTI is the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, a multi-disciplinary research institute. The objective of the competition was to sharpen participants' knowledge about open software tools and interfaces that are reshaping the telecom industry. At the same time the competition encouraged students to explore and develop applications that leverage the rapid advancements of optical networking. The coding competition provided the opportunity to develop optical networking expertise and promote collaboration and interaction. Participants were given one month to complete the same challenge. They spent the month of June competing to develop the most innovative application for Data Center Interconnect (DCI) use-cases. Competing teams developed applications for Ciena's Waveserver stackable interconnect system using the Emulation Cloud, leveraging REST-APIs related to automation, advanced service visualization, proactive service management, and other functions. Competitive programming is defined as a mind sport that takes place over the Internet where teams compete in programming according to provided specifications. The host of the competition outlines the problem and provides a set of programming tools for contestants to use to solve the challenge, all within a time limit. Contestants benefit from not only winning a prize, they learn how to solve and code hard problems and/or create new apps under intense time pressure. Participation also helps to grow their network, improve coding skills, build their resume and gives participants an interesting topic to discuss at a future job interview. In addition to the worldwide program of coding competitions, President Obama's Educate to Innovate Campaign is an all-hands-on-deck approach to improving science, technology, engineering and math education, and providing experiences that will ready students for careers in STEM. Although it is a U.S. initiative, it has inspired Ciena to support programs in education and to actively seek other R&E institutions to partner with for future coding competitions. After assessing all submissions based on level of innovation, potential for business use, and near- and long-term benefits, Ciena's judging panel, which consisted of senior Ciena executives, named Singapore Polytechnic's Team, "SP Avengers," champions of ONIC 2016. The winning team impressed the judges with its innovative mobile network management and monitoring system that was capable of easing the tedious process of troubleshooting with convenient remote access and user-friendly visualization. Congratulations to all the teams that participated in this first-of-its-kind event, specially organized for research and education institutions in the Asia-Pacific region. We hope that by exposing students to real-world software development, including coding work, apps for the network will become as numerous as apps for the smartphone. Fady Masoud 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Cable-in-2020-The-Role-Virtualization-and-Fiber-Deep-Is-Poised-to-Play.html Tue Sep 20 09:06:00 PDT 2016 Elias Cagiannos is MSO Practice Leader at Ciena. This article originally appeared in Multichannel News. In today's environment of cord-cutters and streaming services, cable MSOs are under pressure to offer competitively priced services while providing an enhanced quality of experience. The pressure is not unfounded – there is a lot at stake for cable companies facing what can be described as an "over-the-top (OTT) double-edged sword". Internet service has never been more important to cable companies as they watch linear video give way to on demand programming, but meeting customer demand for fast and reliable internet service is ironically what led to the decline of their video revenue stream as it paved the way for OTT service providers such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. With OTT not going away, cable companies must look to provide a greater experience in order to stay ahead of what will certainly be the future of television to remain viable. But what steps can MSOs take to provide a greater level of service? For one, adoption of virtualization technologies and trends like Head Ends Re-Architected as a Data Center (HERD), which is the adaptation of the telco Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center (CORD) initiative for the MSO market, will be important. Another differentiator is the continued drive to push the network closer to subscribers with what is described as a Fiber Deep evolution—pushing the fiber closer and closer to the end user to provide better service. While cable companies may look different by 2020, whether they begin decoupling programming packages or even aggregating OTT packages as Comcast is planning to do with Netflix, they need to focus on their architecture to support a better experience now and allow them to offer differentiating features in the future. Importance of Highly Responsive Internet Services As user demands around Internet speed and availability have increased, the need to store content locally to provide high quality, responsive access to the content that customers want is required in order to address the competitive landscape. The Internet relies on locally stored or "cached" content to serve up a great user experience. Cable has an advantage here, since they are the network down the block—not miles away in a large data center. That distance will impact responsiveness and, especially in peak hours, quality of service. The cable headend has for many years served up on demand content, but will need to make one more transformation to bring content even closer to consumers. The first generation of streaming video might take customers to a data center out-of-state providing poor performance while tarnishing a cable company's internet services reputation. By leveraging the HERD approach and utilizing data center technologies like virtualization, caching and software defined networking in the headend, those organizations can keep customers satisfied, lower the abandonment rate and make sure the advertisers get compensated. Competition is already robust and to stay ahead, the customer experience is best served from the headend down the road rather than from a random data center in the cloud. Content Delivery, Mobile Edge Computing and the Redefined Network Edge Netflix is a great example of a company that innovated its networks out of necessity. While a fledgling streaming media company a few years ago, the company realized that the legacy Internet was not enough for the new mobile generation. Netflix used the cloud and the internet but found that video would not work unless it was delivered by a local server. When streaming from a far-away data center, the user often became dissatisfied and cancelled their service. Content Delivery Networks solved the problem to a degree, but still lacked the ability to scale with demand and would still limp along slowly. To overcome this challenge, Netflix reimagined content distribution and placed servers close to the Internet's edge, providing near real time responsiveness. Now picture making the performance even better by having the network respond with more bandwidth by effectively optimizing caching technology. By moving and virtualizing these servers and sharing precious network resources, cable MSOs can effectively make all OTT content closer to the end user, improving latency and providing a platform for video aggregation that can support live and real time events such as the Super Bowl or a heavyweight boxing match. And by driving the fiber deeper, they can further improve performance: deep fiber pushes the optical-to-electrical conversion of signals closer to subscribers, which increases potential bandwidth to homes (allowing for support of newer and more numerous services), as well as cutting down on operational costs related to power and maintenance. Marrying Transport and Caching Let's face it, video follows a hockey stick curve, where there may have been slow growth initially but we have seen that growth rate quickly increase to a much faster rate. With the ability today to interact with content and binge watching becoming the new normal, cable MSOs must be able to quickly react and provide a differentiated user experience for their customers. To achieve this, cable MSOs will need to throw a combination of compression, caching, and CDN technologies at the problem. But what if there was a new option, with the ability to get a file from just a few miles away—near instantly—and the user wouldn't realize the difference. The future of the cloud is a combination of network, compute and storage architectures to create the best experience. By offering the right mix of bandwidth and orchestration, cable MSOs will be able to take their businesses to the next level. This will keep the OTT consumers happy while cable MSOs avoid becoming the weak link in the video delivery value chain. Elias Cagiannos 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Quantifying-the-benefits-of-tunable-coherent-modems.html Mon Sep 19 07:08:00 PDT 2016 Helen Xenos is Director, Portfolio Marketing responsible for bringing Ciena's Converged Packet-Optical and high capacity Coherent solutions to market. "How will you help me continue to reduce my transport costs so I can successfully compete in this very aggressive market?" With market prices for bandwidth services dropping greater than 10% on an annual basis, this is a question that is top of mind with many of our customers. How will technology innovation help them efficiently scale their networks to handle the massive growth they are seeing while allowing them to continue to reduce cost per bit and remain a competitive provider? In the past 5 years, 100G coherent technology has enabled a tenfold increase in capacity without requiring changes to the photonic layer. What's next? Programmability -- think multi-domain service orchestration (MDSO) and network function virtualization (NFV) -- is being espoused at all areas of the network to allow for increased automation and agility in turning up new services. At the same time, significant investments are being made in optical networks to integrate more software capabilities into the hardware, which will both accelerate operator responsiveness to unpredictable traffic demands being made onto the network, as well as drive significant cost reduction. Tunable Coherent Modems Let's take a look at tunable coherent modems. I can provide details using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 Extreme coherent modems, which support 5 different modulation formats today: BPSK, 8D-2QAM, QPSK, 4D-8QAM, and 16QAM. Different coding techniques are used to allow for variable-capacity transponders that can be tuned to provide optimal performance for a specific application. And better performance translates directly to quantifiable economic benefits. With BPSK, providers can increase the traffic carrying capacity to support global connectivity of services over their existing compensated (also referred to as legacy) trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific submarine cables. 8D-2QAM uses unique Ciena patent-pending multi-dimensional coding techniques to provide additional system gain and robustness against non-linear impairments. Benefits seen in live submarine networks include 20% additional reach or 40% of additional upgrade capacity versus BPSK. Global bandwidth providers can leverage the additional capacity to extend the life of existing deployed cables and defer expensive new builds. With the additional reach, providers can access efficient global PoP-to-PoP connectivity in more locations, eliminating the traditional submarine-to-terrestrial demarcation via ROADM optical bypass and improve service latency. For the more technically inclined, Michael Reimer from Ciena's Advanced Electro-Optic Development team presents details and measured benefits of multi-dimensional coding in his "Optimized 4 and 8-Dimensional Modulation Formats for Variable Capacity in Optical Networks" paper, which was presented at OFC this year. For terrestrial applications, providers have access to tunable coherent modems running at 100Gb/s, 150Gb/s, or 200Gb/s wavelengths. Ciena offers this option today on both the 6500 Packet-Optical platform for general network applications, as well as on the Waveserver stackable interconnect system for DCI applications. Tunable Modems: A Case Study We recently completed some comprehensive network case studies in an effort to understand to what extent the extra capacity per wavelength could be utilized and quantify the associated network-wide savings. Representing opposite extremes, two very different models based on customer networks and actual A-Z traffic patterns were analyzed: one a North America (NA) metro, and another, a NA content provider network example. A-Z traffic demands are increased to the point of network blocking, and we take a look at how many tunable modems are deployed (normalized per Tb of routed traffic) versus using a fixed 100G modem with equivalent performance. To summarize the results, a 53% reduction in modem count is seen in the metro or short reach application example, and 16% reduction in modem count in the NA ICP or ultra-long haul scenario. Fewer modems translates to both CAPEX and OPEX savings. Fewer wavelengths need to be provisioned and managed, and less hardware needs to be installed, resulting in operational, power, and space savings. The results show that contrary to traditional thinking, metro and regional applications would benefit most from higher quality, tunable coherent modems. The next frontier How do we get to the next level of economic savings for transport networks? The answer is to increase the symbol rate of coherent modems, the rate at which the system processes and transports data across the network, while also increasing the bit rate granularity and capacity ranges a wavelength can support. A target of at least 400Gb/s per wavelength is desirable, to be able to transport new upcoming 400GbE services over a single carrier. I recently spoke to Michel Belanger, Director of Advanced Electro-Optic development at Ciena, who provided some insight as to why increased serial integration, along with increased programmability, is the best approach: "It's very simple. In increasing the symbol rate, we find ways to minimize expensive components like lasers, drivers and modulators. Delivering a modem with a wide range of capacity options allows customers to transform all available capacity, which is present as excess margin in networks today, into revenue-generating services." Migrating towards flexible modems, flexible line systems, flexible client services There are networking implications associated with deploying next generation coherent technology, which are driving increased programmability and flexibility into the network. To achieve the desired system performance while operating at a faster symbol rate, wavelengths from these next generation modems will require larger spectrum than the traditional 50GHz seen in fixed grid systems today. Operators will need to migrate to flexible grid photonic systems to realize the full extent of economic savings associated with the new technology. Also, now that we have a programmable line interface that can adjust to different capacity rates, we also need an efficient means of decoupling and matching the client traffic flexibly to the line capacity to ensure optimal bandwidth is used in the network at any time. This can be delivered in a variety of ways: Very efficiently via a Packet-Optical Transport (POTS) architecture, using high density muxponders is another valid option, and moving forward, upcoming flexible client rates such as Flex Ethernet (FlexE) and Flex OTN (FlexO) are being developed precisely for this purpose. Finally, new operational tools will be required to abstract operational complexity that is associated with the flexible technology and to allow for practical and scalable deployment. To find out more about these key "programmability elements" required for scaling networks into the future, join our "Back to School" educational webinar series, where attendees get the opportunity to hear directly from Michel and some of our other technical experts to gain insights into new technologies transforming optical networks. Helen Xenos 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Five-key-APIs-to-enable-the-concept-of-SDN-based-virtual-networks.html Tue Sep 13 05:25:00 PDT 2016 Fady Masoud is Senior Advisor for Technical Marketing within Ciena's Portfolio Solutions Group responsible for data center interconnect (DCI) solutions. He is co-author of the Experts Guide to OTN and brings 20 years of expertise and insights on architecture and requirements of next-gen optical platforms. With advent of software-defined networks (SDN), the industry has shifted toward open concepts hoping to reduce—and ultimately eliminate—the dependency on various function-specific software tools built and maintained by equipment suppliers. One of the main enablers in the effort to accelerate evolution toward open cloud networking and virtualization is the use of development Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications that specify how software components and services shall interact. A new white paper from Ciena, Leveraging Rich API's for a New DCI Operational Paradigm, explores development APIs and their benefits for optical networks versus the use of traditional management protocols. Here, then, are five key APIs that we use today to enable the concept of SDN-based virtual networks: - REpresentational State Transfer (REST): A general-purpose application program management interface that provides mechanisms to get or push information to/from network resources. It's the most widely deployed public API structure for products and Web services and supports autonomous events, such as alarms. - REST CONFiguration (RESTCONF): An HTTP-based protocol and network-aware application program management interface using REST. It allows access to two datastores: Config, which contains data inserted via controller, and Operational, which contains data inserted via the network. - NETwork CONFiguration (NETCONF): A protocol to push and pull XML-encoded data between Element Management Software (EMS) and Network Elements (NEs). It's designed to modify network configuration and deliver a more capable management and configuration interface than its predecessors. - OpenFlow: A new approach to networking that involves separating the control and data plans to simplify on-switch functionality. It enables low-level, fine-grained control of the forwarding data path and is driven by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). - Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC): An open-source API initiative created by Google and aimed to call methods on a server application on a different machine as if it were a local object, making it easier to create distributed applications and services. APIs provide a simple and easy way to manage network resources while ensuring a smooth integration with IT tools and efficient utilization of IT resources. To learn more, download the Ciena white paper, Leveraging Rich APIs for a New DCI Operational Paradigm. Fady Masoud 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/The-Global-Connectivity-Divide-How-were-doing-and-whats-next-to-fix-it.html Mon Sep 12 05:30:00 PDT 2016 Image by Flicker User: iLighter (Flickr: Google Loon balloon) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Gary Smith is Ciena's President & CEO, having served as Ciena's chief executive for fourteen years. Gary is a member of President Obama's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and serves on the board of directors for Avaya and CommVault Systems. Previous posts in Gary's Digital Revolution series: - Is the Digital Revolution truly driving growth? - Realizing the Digital Age: Why connecting the planet may not be enough... Every day, I read stories where the public is enamored by the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT)—or maybe more accurately the Internet of Sensors. Think of refrigerators that generate your grocery list, self-driving cars, or clothing that can measure your heart rate, breathing rate, and tell you how much sleep you're getting. This connectivity of things promises tremendous advancements in a multitude of applications with massive benefits, but we need to be careful not to lose sight of what's really important about the Internet: connecting people! Even though there are now nearly twice as many things connected to the Internet as there are people, much of the world is still working on the critical "people" part of the equation. The Connectivity Divide You've likely heard me say before that "it's all about the network." Perhaps that is an overly simplistic and idealistic notion, but it's one that is seemingly well supported by multiple economic and social impact studies that attest to global economic growth, job creation, and improvements in quality of life when people are connected. In a World Bank study, for example, a 10% increase in broadband penetration in developing countries correlates to a 1.3% increase in GDP. Essentially, we're recognizing that having access to the Internet is a basic platform for economic prosperity. Hence, we have the term "digital divide"—or more accurately now, the "connectivity divide"—to reflect the uneven access to the Internet across the world and the social and economic divisions it can create. While bridging this divide is rooted in delivering connectivity, it's also overcoming real-world barriers around digital literacy, cultural relevance, societal receptivity, physical access, and, of course, political willingness. And that's not to mention the economics of actually deploying the capital to build and support the necessary infrastructure in developing countries, with minimal incomes to fund the service. How are we doing in addressing this challenge? Whilst industrialized nations are now largely focused on expanding connectivity to drive IoT and that's where the excitement is, two-thirds of the planet still doesn't have basic connectivity (phones or Internet). In fact, according to the ITU, most people around the world have never connected to the Internet. Developing countries are home to more than 90% of the offline population. For perspective, the U.S. has connectivity rates in excess of 90% and parts of Africa are less than 2%. And while the number of Internet users has more than doubled during the past five years to more than 2 billion, the global rate of connectivity is slowing according to Internet.org's State of Connectivity 2015 report. In fact, it's been declining for four straight years to roughly 7% growth in 2014—evidence that the connectivity divide is getting wider. What are we doing to address this challenge? As an industry, we're improving awareness and making innovative efforts to address the connectivity divide for the 5 billion people on planet Earth who are not connected. For example, we have a growing number of commercial, government, and private initiatives underway, including: - The U.S. government—in coordination with the UN, World Bank, and ITU—recently launched the "Global Connect" program, which is aimed at developing country-specific strategies to connect an additional 1.5 billion people by 2020. - Internet.org, a well-publicized partnership between Facebook and a number of companies, works to improve Internet access and connectivity "as a human right" through collaboration with mobile carriers in developing markets. With technology driving a dramatic reduction in costs of network infrastructure, which in many cases are declining faster than Moore's law on computing, we now have greater choice in how we connect people. Take Ciena for example. Since the inception of the company, we've been instrumental in reducing bandwidth costs, having pioneered the "virtualization of fiber" with DWDM technology. And we continue to lead innovation that delivers massive amounts of raw capacity at ever improving economics. That increase in global bandwidth to support mobile base stations and direct broadband connectivity is complemented in many regions by several low-latency satellite constellations specifically targeted at delivering Internet access to hitherto "unconnected" nations. This is also underpinned by a dramatic expansion of submarine cable capacity, which is forecast to grow at a 39% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) during the next five years according to Telegeography, with the most growth on Africa routes. Interestingly, three of the largest investors in these cables are now Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—reinforcing the importance of global connectivity to economic growth. In addition, the desire to extend the Internet to new users is driving these content providers to explore additional investments in innovative new connectivity options, such as beaming signals from solar powered drones in the case of Facebook, and a global network of giant balloons by Google. What do we do next to address this challenge? There's an abundance of positive indicators to suggest that significant awareness and investments exist today to conquer the Connectivity Divide and deliver on the promise of global connectedness. New technologies are facilitating multi-faceted infrastructure builds that are both enabling new economics and driving innovative new business models. It's critical that we continue to evolve the power of the Internet by bringing the digital age to the two-thirds of the planet that has no access. Arguably, the Internet in its broadest form provides the best available opportunity to help drive equality, economic growth, and improve the quality of life on a global basis. If we do not view connectivity as a basic human right and drive its importance accordingly alongside a newfound focus on connecting things, the connectivity divide will persist and likely widen. Let's not let this happen. Gary Smith, Ciena President & CEO 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Relive-Summer-with-Carrier-Ethernet-Summer-Camp.html Thu Sep 08 09:54:00 PDT 2016 The kids are back in school. The mornings have the crisp feel of Fall. It's true, summer is over. But that doesn't mean you can't relive summer camp. Carrier Ethernet Summer Camp that is. That's because we have posted all four sessions from our 2016 Carrier Ethernet Summer Camp to our YouTube channel. Our experts John Hawkins, Brian Lavallée and Bashar Abdullah covered topics that ranged from Power over Ethernet to Packet Synchronization to CPE and TDM-to-Packet migration. All of these discussions are now available on YouTube, including lively Q&A sessions at the end of each session. Click on each session below, or you can binge watch all four with this YouTube playlist. And if all this Carrier Ethernet Summer Camp goodness isn't enough for you, remember that we also have our Essential Guide to Carrier Ethernet eBook, an in-depth, 64-page look at the history of CE, the evolution of Ethernet into a robust and scalable solution for large networks, and use cases that help define where and when to implement CE solutions. We've got the Power (over Ethernet)! Expert: Brian Lavallée and John Hawkins No need to unplug at this campsite. This session shares the secrets of Power over Ethernet (PoE), and the benefits and challenges related to PoE applications. Sync or Swim: Getting Packets in Sync Expert: Bashar Abdullah and John Hawkins Whether end-user, man, or machine, a quality experience requires reliable and precise network timing. Watch this session to learn the latest thinking in synchronization, standards, and best practices. Trailblazing Legacy Services over Packet Networks Expert: John Hawkins Supporting legacy services has its business and technology challenges. Don't get lost in the woods! This session explores circuit emulation technologies and strategies for migrating TDM to packet. Customer Premises Equipment: Small (and Smart) Is Beautiful Expert: John Hawkins Just as the matchbook replaced flint for starting a campfire, smart CPE can revolutionize enterprise application distribution. But migrating to a software-defined networking model can be challenging. This session reviews the business case for virtual network functions along with implementation best practices. Bo Gowan 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/QA-session-Blue-Orbit-and-Service-Provider-DevOps-what-does-it-mean-for-you.html Wed Sep 07 08:50:00 PDT 2016 When Ciena's Blue Planet team unveiled our new DevOps Toolkit and our new DevOps Exchange community a few months ago, it created an immediate buzz with our customers and partners. The toolkit features a set of DevOps-style software development tools that can be utilized by network operators' in-house personnel, and in collaboration with ecosystem partners, to quickly add new virtual and physical network resources. This allows network operators to speeds up the creation and delivery of new on-demand, virtualized services within their SDN and NFV enabled networks, resulting in a significant reduction in cost and dependence on professional services associated with monolithic, vendor-controlled back-office systems. Two of our Blue Planet DevOps experts hosted a live webinar a few weeks ago to detail the new DevOps Toolkit and community, and how it fits in our broader Blue Orbit ecosystem. Blue Planet Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Jim Brinksma and Blue Planet SW Vice President, Manuel Damas hosted the webinar and fielded audience questions during the session. You can sit in on the entire session on-demand, and below are some of the questions that came in from the audience during the event. Q: Is this a technology partner program or a marketing program? Jim: Blue Orbit is a combination of all our technology partnerships and a marketing program. We do technical collaboration, which involves joint testing of solutions in our labs or our partners' labs to make sure we can integrate their technologies into Blue Planet and VSO—to make sure we can fulfill a customer use case. That's the technical aspect of this. There's also a marketing and sales aspect. As you saw with today's release where we added 30 new members to the Blue Orbit ecosystem, we make announcements in conjunction with our partners and we do collaborate on generating joint-sales collateral and delivering to end markets. We also do webinars, and we share information and try to cross-train with sales teams and work with folks as close as we can. Q: DevOps Exchange appears to be very close to an open source approach; how far do you plan to take this into the future and across the product? Manuel: I would say that Blue Planet has always been very open and it's been a big collaborator in the open source community. DevOps Exchange is very focused on being an open source approach to the resource adaptors (RAs); now, we are providers in open source, but also open our doors to our environment community by providing the toolkit to extend the RAs. We're not only just providing the source code in an open source environment, but we're also providing our customers with the openness of the toolkit so that they themselves, the IT departments, and the engineering departments can all collaborate and build new services quickly. Q: How extensible and adaptable is the development environment? Could it handle multiple NFV vendors under one umbrella? Manuel: We're working under Blue Orbit's ecosystem, we're partnering with a number of NFV vendors, and we've integrated a number of NFV vendors. We feel strongly that Blue Planet allows our customers to basically extend the number of vendors they can support easily under our software. We continue to grow the partnerships with the NFV community and we continue to integrate new vendors all the time. We look forward to building a very strong library of NFV vendors. Q: Have you actually secured any customer deployments with your partners? Jim: Absolutely. We actually have a few examples of those on the website, under Blue Orbit Deployments. There's a list of a few companies that we've deployed with and what those solutions actually look like, but these partnerships are really formed to address only the customer use cases and what we're seeing now is not only that—do we secure deployments?—but also our customers driving other technology companies, service companies, etc. our way. So it truly is a partnership: we truly grow together and we really are seeing a lot of customer deployments. Q: Would it be possible to integrate a framework with OSS/BSS systems in order to implement use cases? How would this work? Manuel: This is some of the work we do with a number of our integration partners. It could be done from your IT group, as well. Essentially there is a REST API that's extremely user-friendly on the northbound side of the Blue Planet orchestrate product that most of our customers integrate as OSS and BSS, too. We have a number of vendors that will use the API to either call service templates in to do service creation or will call that API to get access to a particular function within the resource they're trying to manage. Blue Planet allows the users to quickly swap out from vendors, migrate from physical to virtual by having this demarcation in their overall architecture. Q: Do these Blue Orbit partnerships have to be exclusive to Ciena? Jim: The answer is no, you don't necessarily have to be an exclusive partner to Ciena. We welcome any partners and they're also free to partner with anyone else they'd like. Q: What's the difference between a DevOps partner and a technology partner? Manuel: We have a number of technology partners that we work with. The NFV providers are technology partners for us, but DevOps partners are the ones that are collaborating and actually developing Blue Planet, resource adaptors, and service templates. When we talk about a DevOps partner, it could be a customer; it could be a partner of ours; it could be an equipment vendor. We have a number of equipment vendors that will reach out to us and want to get integrated to Blue Planet as they're developing their own RAs. Q: Do you have open training sessions and are they available? Manuel: Yes we do. The training that's initially available is on service template development and resource adaptor development. Those are separate classes that you can take and they are available through our training program. You can go to the actual DevOps Exchange or the Ciena website to find those courses. Q: How do people get access to the DevOps Exchange? Is it only open to Blue Planet customers? Manuel: If you're interested in getting access, please register. The DevOps Exchange is open to all of our partners and all of our potential customers. Q: Is there a cost to become a partner in the Blue Orbit ecosystem? Jim: There's no cost to join the Blue Orbit ecosystem. Manuel: That also goes for the community. No cost to actually enter into the DevOps Exchange—you just need to register. For more information on Ciena's Blue Planet DevOps Toolkit you can download the Infobrief here. You can also learn more about DevOps for Service Provider Networks in this Heavy Reading report. Bo Gowan 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/4-New-OTN-Use-Cases-for-Todays-Networks.html Tue Sep 06 07:23:00 PDT 2016 Kent Jordan is an Advisor of Technology Marketing at Ciena with a focus on packet/optical networking, products, and industry trends, and has a background of 20 years in the optical field. As the communications industry moves to a cloud consumption model, optical networks must be more dynamic and flexible while providing reliable connectivity for massive bandwidth demands. The bottom line is that optical networking dynamics are changing. You may be wondering, "What can I, as a network provider, do about it? And, what equipment can I deploy to make the network more dynamic and flexible?" The answer can be summed up with a surprising, single word: OTN. The OTN protocol has evolved since the early days of the ‘digital wrapper' for WDM and basic encapsulation of SONET and Ethernet services. The combination of OTN and control plane has also evolved – it's not just for mesh networking and restoration anymore. OTN now provides a complete networking solution that enables service velocity and network efficiency. It provides varying service level guarantees for service differentiation, and it can future-proof the network against rapidly changing technologies for both client and line interfaces. Here are four new use cases for OTN in today's network: 1. Service velocity and differentiation Looking for the ability to turn up services faster than the competition? Service providers can use OTN to enable service velocity. An OTN-switched architecture decouples the client from the line and separates service turn up from capacity turn up. On the line side, additional capacity can be added whenever fill levels reach planning thresholds, or depending upon the network architecture being used, excess capacity may already be deployed in the form of unused mesh restoration capacity. Either way, new services can be added quickly, making use of available line side capacity across the network without needing to dedicate a new wavelength between two points, like a traditional transponder based architecture. And, having the ability to quickly turn up services with OTN is a key building block for dynamic provisioning with SDN-based network control applications. 2. Improve network efficiency The technology curve and adoption rate for new client interfaces historically has not moved at the same rate as the migration to higher capacity line ports. As line rates diverge from client rates, OTN can be used to more efficiently pack wavelengths in the network. The ODUflex rate within the OTN standard allows the right-sizing of bandwidth for a wide range of services carried across the network. ODUflex containers can be used to map services, such as FC400, more efficiently into OTN rather than dedicating a full 2.5G (ODU1) or 10G (ODU2) per service. Furthermore, OTN can carry Ethernet services across any distance, from metro to long-haul. It supports sub-rate Ethernet by flexibly mapping Ethernet into containers with a 1.25G bandwidth granularity. Service providers can rate limit the bandwidth on 10GE, 40GE, or 100GE clients per the SLA, and map the sub-rate Ethernet into an ODUflex payload. This opens the door to sell a 50G service on a 100GE port by mapping 50G of client Ethernet traffic into ODUflex and leaving 50G available for other services, rather than tying up 100G of bandwidth across the network for a 50G service as in transponder systems. And, once services are established, capacity can be adjusted up or down in-service, if and when customer bandwidth requirements change. 3. Enable policy adherence and special service requirements Another way service providers can differentiate is by catering to special service requirements. Customer requirements for service level agreements, protection/restoration, and routing constraints can be guaranteed through use of OTN switching and control plane. Latency sensitive services can be routed based on lowest latency rather than shortest distance to provide latency guarantees for the primary path or even during restoration in the event of a failure. The OTN control plane can be used to differentiate between high and low priority customers, as well as to offer a number of different protection/restoration service levels, ranging from permanent connections for high priority services to pre-emptable low-priority services. Ciena's OTN control plane can even optimize resources across VPN topologies to constrain them to a specific subset of resources, enabling Optical VPN connections for specific customers or service types. Furthermore, the OTN control plane allows the flexibility to assign weights to different links, designate nodes as transit sites, restrict nodes from path computation, and to define Shared Risk Link Groups (SRLG), so services can be established, protected, and restored according to specific SLAs and policies. And, the most important new use case is: 4. Future-proofing the network The separation of client from line with an OTN switch not only enables service velocity, but it allows OTN to future proof the network from technology changes. If you are worried that new modulation schemes and line rates may strand infrastructure investments, then look to OTN to allow reuse of client cards and ports as new line cards are deployed. When line rates beyond 100G/200G are deployed or as flexible grid line interfaces are rolled out, all of the existing client resources and cards in the network can remain in place and the OTN switch can migrate them to the new line interfaces as they are installed. Transponder-based architectures do not allow this level of flexibility – when a transponder is deployed, fiber patches must be made for the new line interfaces, as well as all of the client traffic. Furthermore, OTN has built-in support for beyond 100G (B100G) rates with updates to the OTN standard that extend the line side interface to include a new, flexible n x 100G format called OTUCn. This enables OTN to future-proof the line side interface with direct support for scalability to capacities beyond 100G. OTN enables an easy way to tradeoff capacity vs. reach vs. spectrum for true network optimization. Line side programmability with new coherent interfaces allow service providers to change modulation to get more capacity (depending on the distance) or to increase reach (while trading off capacity). An OTN switch can move traffic around as adjustments are made on the line side to make efficient use of network resources. Furthermore, line side transport capacity can be shared across multiple client interfaces. Similarly, OTN provides future-proofing for the client side. As new client interfaces and rates are introduced, the existing line interfaces and ports can remain in place, and the OTN switch can groom the new client services into existing line ports. ODUflex can be used when new client rates, such as higher rate Fiber Channel or Video signals, are standardized that do not map directly into an OTN container such as ODU0, ODU1, ODU2, etc. Also, when FlexE client interfaces are deployed, the existing line cards do not become obsolete. They can work with the new cards that take advantage of the new client service types and mappings. Harness the power of OTN with 6500 OTN turns the network into a dynamic and programmable infrastructure; it enables the efficient use of network resources, and the flexibility to support new and changing traffic demands. Ciena's 6500 packet optical platform, including the new T-Series configuration, was designed to use the power of OTN to make networking easier, more efficient, and scalable. It scales to terabit per slot capacities and provides packet/OTN switching with control plane for service velocity, network efficiency, and policy adherence. Ciena 6500 future proofs the network through the separation of client and line interfaces, safeguarding against new technologies on the client or line side interfaces. In other words, the power of OTN combined with the 6500 paves the way to transition to a cloud consumption model that requires a more dynamic, flexible, and reliable optical network. Kent Jordan 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/Automating-the-WAN-with-SDN--Avoiding-Hurry-Up-and-Wait.html Wed Aug 31 07:58:00 PDT 2016 Mitch Auster is a senior advisor in product marketing at Ciena with over 20 years' experience helping network operators transform their networks by leveraging software intelligence and packet-optical technologies, spending the last 5 years focused on SDN and NFV to improve service agility and operational efficiency. "Hurry up and wait!" This is a phrase that expresses the exasperation when you've done everything you can to make things happen on time, only to have something outside your control cause the process to grind to a halt. Like filling out your travel visa paperwork at home, taking the express train to get to the embassy before it opens, yet still having to wait all day to be serviced. Too often, this is how pioneers in NFV-based services must feel. They've established the cloud data center pods, on-boarded the VNFs, programmed the orchestrator and set up the self-serve portal – so that the desired VNFs can be spun up on-demand. Unfortunately, the Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity between the enterprise locations, the data center, and the Internet, cloud or content providers still takes weeks to be provisioned. Essentially, it's hurry up and wait. The issue is that the WAN has been built up over several years through multiple technologies (e.g. optical, Ethernet, IP, MPLS) with multiple generations of proprietary equipment from several vendors. This complexity is often amplified by the merger of multiple providers. Network and service provisioning across this conglomeration requires interacting with multiple EMS/NMS within each technology or vendor domain, and manually stitching connectivity between domains. This process is time consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone. Before network operators can reap the rewards enabled by virtualization technologies, they first need to deploy a WAN automation solution to overcome these obstacles to agility. In fact, we are seeing a rapidly growing number of service providers prioritizing WAN automation for provisioning traditional connectivity services and the infrastructure underlying their other services (e.g. mobile, residential). Many times, this is even before broaching NFV, and next-generation virtualized services. This makes a ton of sense given the fact that it reduces opex, shortens time-to-revenue, and improves network utilization across the brownfield network that generates almost all of their current revenues – not to mention the fact that it paves the way to avoid the "hurry up and wait" scenario when they do deploy NFV-based services. Now, I know what you must be thinking – haven't we heard claims about end-to-end (E2E) provisioning ad nauseum? Well, yes – so the question is "why is this still a problem?" Here are a few reasons: - When E2E provisioning has been done by a vendor NMS, it is only for their own network elements (NEs) and perhaps a handful of their strategic partners' NEs - Independent OSS vendors went about developing costly "activation packs" that were also vendor/product-specific and typically only for major vendors - In both cases, typically only a single technology (e.g. MPLS or SONET/SDH) can be provisioned at a time, and WDM has been statically provisioned - Any time you want to add a new device type or modify the service, you need the vendors to reprogram the interdependent hard-coded logic throughout the software stack all the way from the OSS to each affected EMS/NMS or device So, operators have been teased with short-lived, quasi-E2E provisioning limited to what others have decided comprises the end-to-end. In today's dynamic and competitive landscape, this approach doesn't cut it. Ciena's Blue Planet offers a modern approach to WAN automation, using SDN orchestration. First, it has a multi-layer, model-based architecture, which provides an abstract representation of the network to the service layer as well as an abstract representation of heterogeneous devices to the network layer. This means that service logic can be developed independent of the specific technology, device or vendor that will be invoked to render the specifications of the service. Next, workflows for end-to-end service provisioning aren't hard-coded and compiled into a software release. Instead, service lifecycle logic is template-driven, with templates "compiled" by Blue Planet's orchestration engine at run-time. Service templates (STs) can be added or modified independent of any release stream. Resource adapters (RAs) provide the mapping between the common network information model and each vendor/product-specific device (or domain controller) data model and interface protocol. Like STs, these RAs are not hard-coded into a release, but are independently developed. Critical to our customers though is one important fact. These STs and RAs don't need to be developed by Ciena. In fact, we've launched the Blue Planet DevOps Toolkit and an open developers community (Blue Planet DevOps Exchange) to encourage and assist network operators, 3rd-party NE suppliers, independent software vendors, systems integrators, and others to develop these on their own, or in collaboration, to meet their particular use cases on their own timelines. Of course, Ciena is ready, willing and able to do the development as well if asked. Blue Planet's technology-independent orchestration engine, model-based architecture, and DevOps-enabled service templates and resource adapters make it fast and practical to achieve end-to-end, multi-vendor WAN automation across multiple layers that is easily and continually maintained, enhanced and extended. This has been proven in several recent customer deployments including: - CenturyLink, a Tier-1 service provider using Blue Planet to automate Carrier Ethernet service activation/provisioning and performance management, in addition to NFV and SD-WAN provisioning, - a global Tier-1 service provider headquartered in Europe using Blue Planet to drive virtualized services on top of an automated WAN, - a large Tier-2 service provider using Blue Planet to orchestrate a mixed Ciena and competitor's optical services network (with plans to extend this to Ethernet and IP layers), - and a large data center operator using Blue Planet to automate a global Juniper MX-based IP network. These examples build upon Blue Planet's long history of providing SDN-enabled WAN automation across multi-vendor networks. As suggested earlier, using SDN for WAN automation is a critical initial step toward bigger and better things. While it reduces opex and shortens time-to-revenue for traditional services, it also provides a springboard to offering bandwidth-on-demand and bandwidth calendaring for applications like hybrid cloud connect, data center interconnect, scheduled backup services, disaster recovery and network-as-a-service. And it can be combined with NFV and SD-WAN orchestration to offer enhanced managed services, improved customer experience for cloud services, and much more. The beauty of Blue Planet is these additional functions are part of the platform ready and waiting for you to put them to use. With WAN automation enabled by Blue Planet, the days of "hurry up and wait" will be replaced by "keep calm and orchestrate." Learn more about the new adventures in network orchestration by downloading our free copy of the SDN/NFV e-guide. Mitch Auster 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0 http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/QA-with-Ron-Kline-Predicting-the-Pace-of-Change-in-our-Industry.html Tue Aug 30 06:12:00 PDT 2016 Richard van der Draay is an Australian business journalist focusing on telecommunications, networking technology and cyber security. Change is a constant theme in the tech and telecom world, and one that Ron Kline has lived throughout his professional career. I recently had an opportunity to talk in-depth with Ron, who joined Ciena in June as Director of Market and Competitive Insights. Ron came on board following a stint as principal analyst at Ovum, where his brief centered on network infrastructures. Before that, he served for seven-and-a-half years as optical networks research director at RHK. In addition, he was a long-time senior member of the technical division at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). Ron's experience over three decades has given him a deep perspective on the many factors that affect the pace of change in our industry and how companies must adapt. Below is our conversation. Q: How do you feel your background in market intelligence, as well as your unique experience in different industry roles, will help shape your focus in your new role as Director of Market Intelligence? Ron: It's actually what led me here. I started my career working for a service provider for 18 years and then moved over to the analyst community for 16 years. And, when I saw the position at Ciena, it was essentially the same role I was doing as an analyst. But what's different are the clients, so instead of having multiple clients, I [now] have customers that are internal-facing and different organisations within the company. The type of work that I do or have been doing is similar, very similar, but the outcome or rather the clients are different. It's more geared towards being market driven. And in a marketing sense, [it's more about] helping the company with its internal strategy. It's sort of a different slant but actually from the viewpoint of doing what I do, it's very similar. Q: What single lesson from your days as an Ovum and RHK Research analyst do you think you will be absorbing into your new role? Ron: I guess complacency. You have to be aware of change, which is often tough to see. Things move at a glacial pace in this industry, technology does take a long time to develop. We can be developing a certain technology for ten years, but being able to look forward and see ‘this is important and [this] change is coming' and then how to manage that migration, I think that is part of being able to do that [successfully] in light of [the fact] that it takes so long to change. A good example is SDN and NFV, which have been around now for, let's say, three years. But the whole idea behind software-driven networks has been around since the 80s, really. It's just changed, right? So, you have that paradigm and OK, now we have SDN and NFV but how quickly do people move from the old paradigm to the new one? Some of our customers will move rather quickly and some will be laggards, so you have to be able to manage that transition both with your product set and your marketing. Q: What should be the focus around research and market intelligence in terms of applying insights to new business projects and developing new products and services as part of a company's go-to-market strategy? Ron: We have to keep a good handle on the markets we're in. How big are they? How are they transitioning? But the big key here is keeping your eye on the substitutes market that is developing. From that, you have this idea of virtualization and disaggregation that's underlying the industry. This will take many years to come to fulfilment but you can't ignore the fact that these changes are occurring. You have to do both and I think that to me it's almost a budget problem. Now we have to invest and learn to be on top of these new software and cloud-driven environments as services change, and as we delve deeper into our client base we have to support many more things. For instance, it's not only the technical change that's hitting the telecom carriers. If you look at the vertical industries, the enterprise verticals; each one of those it hits in a different way. It's important to understand how these changes are affecting how these companies are spending money into their networks. Q: In the near term, what do you see as crucial for any networking vendor to gain the competitive edge, seeing how this industry – as are most these days – seems to be increasingly prone to disruption? Ron: Software. The edge will be provided by software. As much as there is development on the hardware side that drives differentiation, that's often short-lived. It's not long before somebody else will copy or be able to develop the same technology. 100G is a good example. 100G or 200G, other vendors will catch up as you go. Software is a bit different. It embeds you into your customers' processes. It's a little more ‘sticky' in terms of being relied upon. At Ciena we have some really good orchestration products that will enable us to be in the middle of our customers' businesses for many years to come. It's not just [a matter of] putting in a network and providing some software to run the network; this is a much bigger piece. You're not only providing software and hardware; you're also helping them bring services to market, which is really the endgame for them and which is the key. Richard van der Draay 2014-07-09 15:02:14.0