You have enough on your plate -trying to operate your network while figuring out a plan on how to migrate all of your TDM circuits to IP, and your budget probably isn't growing either. At next week's OFC in Los Angeles, we're excited to show you the latest innovations in our service lifecycle management platform. It takes an SDN-oriented approach to lifecycle management, enabling you to simplify and automate day-to-day management tasks including planning, provisioning, and service assurance. In the past, these functions were done in silos -with different tools, often by different teams, and possibly in different locations. With our new platform, you have one integrated dashboard that supports all these key management tasks -in one easy to use application.

Planning Capabilities

The integrated planning app dramatically simplifies how you would setup and configure your network. With just a traffic demand input file including the connectivity between COs and the desired bandwidth, the planning tool calculates the devices and line cards required to support the traffic demand. It shows you the bandwidth required (between COs) and where each of the device needs to be deployed. The planning tool's output file specifies the number of devices, device configuration, as well as the layout of the device -including where the line cards would be positioned within a chassis. When you're ready to deploy the network, the integrated provisioning component takes the data from the output file, downloads the appropriate software files to each device and complete the configuration. What could be easier?

Service Assurance Capabilities

After the network setup is complete, you can use the integrated service assurance app to verify circuits are performing according to their SLA. For example, you want to examine an optical circuit connecting one central office to another. With one click, you can visualize the circuit and see the end-to-end connection, including any other COs that the circuit may flow through. The dashboard view provides all the stats you need to verify that the circuit is performing optimally, including forward error correction, optical power level, error in bytes (delivering), jitter, and latency. If there is a problem on a circuit, the app's logical view shows you exactly what's impacted including the intermediate ports and line cards. You see exactly where the problem exists and you can clearly associate the hardware fault to the circuit and do an impact analysis to see what customers are impacted.

Future releases will support audit based rules enabling you to quickly and easily verify that settings across devices are in compliance. If one device happens to change state, an alarm will show if it's out of compliance.

At Cisco we're working to simplify, automate, and virtualize the network. Come check us out at OFC Booth#1501, ask to see the Service Lifecycle Management demo or learn about TDM-to-IP migration and see our vision in action.