The digital world is evolving at a breakneck pace, giving rise to greater demand for AI and automation. The result? Big data is pushing optical network traffic to the limits. To meet this insatiable capacity demand as cost-effectively as possible, network operators are seeking technologies and advancements that enable increased bandwidth over existing fiber. Yet, this architectural revolution is creating new challenges for telcos, service providers and data center interconnect (DCI) network operators as they find themselves grappling with multilayer, multidomain, multivendor network control.
Focus on end-to-end network visualization
As AI places unprecedented pressure on today’s networks, equipment vendors are introducing innovations in optical technologies, modulation techniques and network architectures designed to squeeze more capacity out of existing fiber spans. At the same time, reliance on open, multivendor infrastructure continues to grow due to the opportunities it presents for reduced costs, greater agility and a more flexible supply chain.
Yet, while disaggregated optical networks offer enticing prospects to transform network operations and optimize costs, multivendor network design, control and operation becomes increasingly complicated. Moreover, this situation is only compounded in highly automated, data-intensive, multilayer networks, as disparate vendor equipment is managed by individual controllers, and operational data is not readily available beyond each vendor’s controller.
Ultimately, the sheer complexity of monitoring and managing multivendor networks presents significant challenges. As a result, the ability to gather meaningful performance insights across domains requires a great deal of time and effort, hindering end-to-end troubleshooting and service orchestration.
Take control of multivendor networks
In this ever more dynamic and complex landscape, network operators’ success hinges on their ability to adapt and innovate. The increasing disaggregation of the optical network enables a more agile and innovative approach. However, navigating the relationship between multivendor components requires new tools to provide a comprehensive overview of the network — from ensuring seamless connectivity and maintaining ultra-low latency, to safeguarding against security threats and managing power consumption.
To enable greater control in this multivendor, multidomain and multilayer environment, 1Finity offers unified orchestration and network control with the Virtuora Optical Orchestration platform. With a cloud-native foundation leveraging open-source components, this comprehensive software platform enables end-to-end management of the service lifecycle, device configuration, fault management and performance monitoring analytics for multilayer (L0-L3) networks.
Management of Open Optical Line System (OLS) domains also presents unique challenges, particularly given the proprietary aspects of integrating OLS equipment with their respective domain controllers. To address this complexity, Virtuora integrates with third-party domain controllers via a standard TAPI interface, and incorporates a framework for creating Domain Controller Adapters (DCAs) to accommodate ongoing standards changes.
In addition, solutions such as 1Finity’s OLS Designer (OLS-D) play a critical role in simplifying multivendor OLS planning and design by enabling operators to model, validate and optimize optical line systems across diverse vendor environments before deployment.
Together, these capabilities facilitate onboarding and integration of third-party domain controllers, allowing Virtuora to exchange information with each domain to provide an end-to-end optimal view and maximize resource utilization. In fact, the Virtuora Network Controller has received Bronze Badges for both NBI and SBI from the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) recognizing a commitment to accelerate and drive the adoption of open, disaggregated solutions.
Real-time monitoring
In addition to management across multivendor components, network operators also need to respond quickly to changes in the service layer of the network to optimize quality of experience. The Virtuora Optical Orchestrator solution enables operations teams to monitor the real-time state of the network and efficiently plan incremental services with simple dashboard-based visualization.
By allowing operations teams to monitor multiple domains through a single user interface, Virtuora Optical Orchestrator provides appropriate correlations, fault isolation and related information needed to speed troubleshooting. This not only helps reduce downtime, but also blends network data in multiple formats to gain meaningful insights about network performance, allowing operators to fully optimize multivendor, multidomain optical networks.
Optimize for tomorrow
As the demand for data continues its relentless growth, ongoing network evolution will be critical to supporting AI and cloud computing workloads. With 1Finity’s pragmatic approach to interoperability based on vast experience with multivendor, open optical networks, the Virtuora Optical Orchestrator platform provides an industry-leading multidomain, multivendor, scalable network control solution. In this way, network visualization, management and control of the end-to-end network can be unified, unlocking greater capacity and service optimization that boosts revenue and reduces costs.
