
Ciena Blue Planet
The Ciena Blue Planet Packet Design Layer 3 Service Assurance solution solves this challenge by collecting and analyzing IGP and BGP routing data in real time, and integrating it with traffic and performance telemetry to provide unique path-aware analytics. This innovative solution provides NOC teams and network engineers an always-current view of the Layer 3 network and actionable insights to reduce the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for service delivery issues, resulting in fewer outages, improved service quality, and happier customers.
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Core2Africa Value Proposition for Ciena Blue Planet
Core2Africa has been a Ciena Blue Planet partner since 2010, having developed a high level of knowledge, skill and experience working a variety of customers in Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands. Multiple implementations across a variety of local and global service providers positions Core2Africa as the premier integrator for Ciena Blue Planet in Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands.
Solutions Matrix
Ciena Blue Planet fits into three pillars of the Core2Africa SNAAP Matrix, namely Networks, Analytics and Automation, aligning with the challenges that have arisen within the service provider environment, including:
• Network Performance and Dimensioning
• Visibility & Understanding of Subscriber Behaviour, Network Behaviour and Service Behaviour
• Quality of Service
• Price Compression
• Service Commoditisation
• Reduced Barriers to Entry for New Competitors
• Security
• Revenue Leakage
In line with these challenges Core2Africa has developed a structured approach to best manage them: S-N-A-A-P
Core2Africa Product Focus
Core2Africa promotes, sells and implements the five products comprising Blue Planet Route Optimisation and Assurance. All implementations are conducted using Core2Africa Professional Services, following a Structured 7-Step End-to-End Approach, and supported by Core2Africa Maintenance & Support Services.
Blue Planet Route Optimization
and Assurance Explorer Suite for Network Service Assurance
Ciena’s Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance (ROA) Explorer Suite is used by the world’s leading network operators, enterprises, and government entities to assure the delivery of critical Layer 3 services across the cloud. The ROA Explorer Suite uniquely combines routing, traffic, and performance analytics for real-time, path-aware operational monitoring, and back-in-time forensics for troubleshooting transient problems that can cause major service disruptions.
Interactive modeling helps engineers accurately predict the impact of changes, simulate new workloads for capacity planning, and test failure scenarios to build more resilient networks.
ROA Route Explorer
IP networks change constantly, automatically re-routing traffic based on network load conditions and when problems occur. While conventional tools poll the infrastructure for health status and utilization metrics, they cannot provide insight into the network’s control plane. Without the ability to visualize, monitor, analyze and model changes to the Layer 3 operation of the network, pinpointing and correcting service delivery problems, building in network resiliency, and optimizing performance is ad hoc, manually-intensive and error-prone.
Route Explorer™ application, part of Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance products, is the industry’s leading IP/MPLS route analytics software, designed for network engineers, architects, planners, peering analysts, and operations teams responsible for today’s complex, mission-critical service provider and enterprise networks. It provides management visibility into routing behaviour for all IGP and BGP protocols, Layer 2/3 VPNs, traffic engineering tunnels, segment routing and multicast with real-time monitoring, historical reporting, and what-if modelling capabilities.
ROA Traffic Explorer
Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance (ROA) product’s Traffic Explorer® application provides real-time and historical views into traffic flows. In combination with ROA Route Explorer®, it delivers visibility into network-wide routing paths and traffic behaviour. With Traffic Explorer, the world’s largest organizations can operate, troubleshoot, plan, and optimize their networks with unprecedented accuracy and speed. Network engineers, planners and operations teams are able to view complex IP/MPLS networks as integrated systems rather than collections of discrete devices and links, enabling them to maximize IT efficiency and productivity while reducing the capital and operational expenses required to maintain top network service quality.
ROA Performance Explorer
Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance product’s Performance Explorer application collects and reports SNMP-based performance data (e.g. availability, CPU, memory, latency, packet loss, jitter, etc.) from all network devices under management. Working in combination with ROA Route Explorer and ROA Traffic Explorer, Performance Explorer completes the industry’s first unified, path-aware network service assurance solution, and complements existing SNMP tools.
ROA Performance Explorer correlates routing events with latency and performance metrics to help network professionals understand how service delivery is affected by network routing behaviour. With real-time and historical visibility into service paths and device performance network-wide, engineers can now optimize their networks with unprecedented accuracy and speed.
ROA Explorer Path Provisioning
The Explorer Path Provisioning application is a key component of the Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance (ROA) product family. Like the Traffic Engineering application, it leverages ROA’s vendor-agnostic IP/MPLS telemetry and analytics to give network operators powerful automated service provisioning capabilities. With the Path Provisioning application, service providers can quickly and easily create a catalogue of IP/MPLS transport services that, when integrated with an SDN controller or service orchestrator like Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO), can be used to automate fulfilment of subscriber requests. Constraints may be applied to address a variety of path provisioning use cases, such as diversity, low latency, disaster recovery and data sovereignty.
ROA Explorer Traffic Engineering
The Explorer Traffic Engineering (Explorer TE) application is an example of the intelligent, software-controlled orchestration capabilities that can be achieved with the Blue Planet Route Optimization and Assurance (ROA) product.
Explorer TE leverages ROA’s rich IP/MPLS network telemetry and analytics to automate the difficult and time-consuming task of balancing network loads. It does this by creating Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP-TE) or Segment Routing (SR-TE) tunnels to shift traffic from heavily-congested links to lightly-used links. This results in better overall use of network resources and smoother service delivery. The TE application taps into several components of ROA, including real-time IGP and BGP routing telemetry, traffic matrices, policy-based path computation and optimization engine, to provision new traffic engineering tunnels via Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) or any third-party SDN controller. It accesses these components via open RESTful APIs.
Ciena Blue Planet Product Updates and News
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Always check the Ciena Blue Planet website for the latest updates
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NOTE: These product updates include ONLY those products sold and supported by Core2Africa.
White Papers
Blue Planet® Layer 3 Service Assurance
In today’s global market, businesses requiring connectivity between their geographically diverse locations depend on the Layer 3 services offered by their network service providers. Network uptime and service delivery assurance are of utmost importance to these subscribers to ensure business continuity. Blue Planet Layer 3 Service Assurance gives providers unmatched visibility into their routing control plane, allowing them to speed up troubleshooting of Layer 3 performance issues. Users can see exactly how traffic is traversing their network and identify sub-optimal routing metrics, route flaps, and many other conditions not detected by traditional network monitoring tools.
Restoring Visibility into the Cloud with Route Analytics
Cloud computing leverages the ubiquity of the Internet, the flexibility of server virtualization, and the massive scale of today’s data centres to provide low-cost IT infrastructure as a network-based service. Despite being widely adopted over the last decade, many enterprises are still lagging when it comes to managing their cloud infrastructure that resides on the Internet or shared service provider networks.
MPLS Traffic Engineering
This document explains MPLS Traffic Engineering, including its major advantages: congestion avoidance and efficient use of existing network resources that can be idle or under-utilized. By driving traffic from over-utilized links to under-utilized ones, Traffic Engineering avoids network congestion caused by too much traffic on the least-cost link. This helps prevent packet drops and ensures data delivery.
White Paper TitleSpeeding Problem Diagnosis in the Network Operations Cente
A challenge faced by Network Operations Center (NOC) personnel responsible for large, complex IP/MPLS networks is locating the network issues that affect application performance and availability. This is due to the sheer number of paths that traffic can traverse when routed through a large network. According to a survey by an analyst firm, network issues are involved in over 50 per cent of application and service delivery problems. Given this, speed and accuracy in diagnosing application or service-affecting network issues is a serious matter for organizations that aim to provide excellent service.
Data Center Interconnect Essentials 2019
To meet the insatiable demand for video, data, and cloud-based content and services, Data Center Interconnect (DCI) technologies have evolved to enable ultra-high capacity, massive scalability, power efficiency, and management simplicity. As the name suggests, DCI is the technology that connects two or more data centres together over short, medium, or long distances using high-speed packet-optical connectivity. It connects routers and servers to each other or to multi-tenant data centres, so end-users and data can connect to storage and compute resources, cloud applications, and cloud services.
