Telecom network vendor Ciena on Tuesday announced enhancements to its Blue Planet network orchestration software.
The enhancements enable telecom service providers to accelerate their transformation from closed network architectures to on-demand software-driven networks.
“We’re poised to bring together SDN, NFV and service orchestration into a unified, open platform that enables service providers to leverage these cutting-edge technologies for building virtualized on-demand networks and cloud-based service offerings,” said Mike Hatfield, senior vice president & general manager, Blue Planet, Ciena.
Ciena’s Blue Planet software helps telecom service providers automate services – from creation to orchestration to delivery – across both physical and virtual domains. Reduction in operational costs, elimination of network complexity and competitive advantage are the main benefits.
Busy morning at the #Layer123 @CienaBluePlanet pic.twitter.com/T9GUFKCF4t
— Joe Cumello (@JCumello) October 14, 2015
Blue Planet loosely couples software functions within these containers to create and enable SDN Management and Control, NFV Orchestration, and Multi-Domain Service Orchestration. Ciena said the new architecture also enables disaggregation of the software stack, enabling telecoms to add their own services.
New TOSCA-based service templates equip providers with DevOps style self-service programmability of resources for creating, deploying, or enhancing services. This reduces professional services fees typically required by OSS or integration vendors.
Support for business process model and notation (BPMN) standard simplifies integration with legacy OSS/BSS systems and simplifies providers’ ability to create, integrate and operate new services. BPMN reduces network complexity and improves the ability to offer programmable, self-service tools to end-users.
Blue Planet supports non-Ciena domains to deliver service orchestration. This enables telecoms to select and deploy better options at each domain without losing operational simplicity and abstraction. It also reduces vendor lock-in and ensures low-cost operations across multi-vendor physical or virtual functions and domains.
Blue Planet incorporates more than 15 standards or open source code bases including Docker, LINUX, TOSCA, BPMN, Netconf/YANG, etc.
“Ciena’s Blue Planet division is delivering innovation in the network virtualization and service orchestration space. Their movement toward micro-services architectures and containers is in tune with leading network operators, who expect that these compelling technologies will help them to transform, virtualize, and differentiate,” said Michael Howard, senior research director, IHS-Infonetics.
