Journey to Digital Transformation with Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller

Journey to Digital Transformation with Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical ControllerIn order to not just survive – but thrive – in the new digital era, communication service providers (CSPs)Contents

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Executive summary

In order to not just survive – but thrive – in the new digital era, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are now required to undergo their own digital transformation. In this e-book, we’ll highlight the path enabled by Cisco Crosswork® Hierarchical Controller (formerly Sedona NetFusion), moving from process-driven, manual networks to data-driven, fully autonomous networks. This transformation will enable CSPs to reduce both complexity and costs, improve the efficiency of deploying converged networks, and deliver new revenue-generating services to meet evolving business demands.

Executive summary

The challenge

CSPs have been providing the essential infrastructure for the digitalization of multiple industries. However, CSPs themselves have been slow to join the
digital transformation.

CSPs continue to come up short, between aging legacy systems and providing OTT solutions for:

Siloed networks and complex organizational structures can prevent CSPs from building out the agile service offerings required to meet the demands of today’s digital business environment. CSP networks and their departments are often siloed across several distinct domains (for example, IP and MPLS and optical networks and vendor domains). Bridging these domains and obscuring the underlying complexities is key for operators to compete into the future.

The opportunity

Journey to Digital Transformation

The architecture

Over recent years, CSPs and standard bodies have converged on a common architecture for deploying SDN automation. This agreed architecture is based on three tiers of control, starting from the top:

Service orchestrators - assurance tools and systems, which are fundamentally part of the next-generation OSS, comprise the first tier. These systems understand the business side of the operations of the service provider but don’t understand the network in depth.

The hierarchical controller is responsible for understanding the entire network and providing a simplified abstract view toward the OSS tools. The hierarchical controller does not talk directly to the network devices but relies on SDN controllers for different domains, be it microwave domains, WDM/OTN optical domains, or packet domains.

The domain controller is responsible for discovering their network data for optimizing paths within their network, configuring services within their own domain, updating the hierarchical controller about changes in the network, and taking their requests from the hierarchical controller to affect change
in the network.

The architecture (cont.)

The missing pieces

Service providers have plenty of data on users, content and applications, but a big blind
spot covers their network infrastructure:

The first step for CSPs in undergoing the journey to digital transformation is to have a correct, complete, and consistent data on the
network – something few CSPs actually have.

The digital twin

The ultimate network data source with full service-to-fiber visibility

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller provides a complete model of how the service is laid over the different network routers all the way down to the fiber. The real-time, up-to-date model, tracks every change as new networks and devices are added, failures occur, and services get rerouted.

The digital twin correlates data from disparate domains, layers, and vendor silos – and combines this data into a unified view of the entire network.

Patented and automated discovery method maps topology, traffic, and services into a live, unified network model
Only platform that achieves a complete, near-real-time data source, drawn directly from the network for a transparent, fully visible view of the network 24/7
Offers deep, network-wide visibility, enabling business decisions to be made with the full knowledge of the network

Network intelligence

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller: Enabling smarter business decisions through network intelligence

Multilayer
Enables a deep understanding of L0 to L3, increasing reliability for managing the network. The cross-layer, network-wide visibility exposes all paths and provides insight into service impact issues.

Multidomain
Automatically collects and abstracts the network topology, traffic, and state, offering immediate end-to-end network visibility of all routers and connections across domains, visualized in the platform’s GUI.

Multivendor
Connecting to all major vendor IP and optical equipment and creating one single, holistic view of the network

Network analytics

Collecting lots of pieces…

And putting them all together

Data acquisition model
The data acquisition model performs behavioral analysis to understand how the domains and layers connect to each other, ensuring consistency of the network model, whether the network has fully migrated to SDN controllers or not.

Unified network model
A deep-layering structure is flexible enough to accommodate legacy layers (SONET), current layers (WDM, OTN, Ethernet, MPLS, IP) and emerging new layers.

Powerful analytics
Deep-layer analytics of the network model and its history over time with a simple Python API. Customers can create their own custom scripts to derive important insights about the network structure and its state and can take advantage of advanced visualization tools.

So — You have the
Data and Network Intelligence...

The journey with SDN

The maturity model

The journey toward SDN and automated network control requires organizations to adopt a maturity model that allows them to gradually move from a read-only and legacy system focus to automation and a SDN focus. Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller was built with the maturity model in mind, allowing CSPs to evolve their networks through managed phases to become service-aware and automated.

The maturity model

The journey toward SDN and automated network control
requires organizations to adopt a maturity model that allows
them to gradually move from a read-only and legacy system focus to automation and a SDN focus. Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller was built with the maturity
model in mind, allowing CSPs to evolve their networks through managed phases to become service-aware and automated.

Data-driven network

During the initial transition from legacy to SDN,
Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller is able to communicate with both legacy SONET protocols as well as SDN controllers and service orchestrators. This allows a gradual transition that fits each customer’s individual needs and constraints during the transition.

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities
in a data-driven network:

Inventory assurance
Shared risk analysis
Service-to-fiber visibility
Migration planning
Diversity assurance

Data-driven network

During the initial transition from legacy to SDN, Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller is able to communicate with both legacy SONET protocols as well as SDN controllers and service orchestrators. This allows a gradual transition that fits each customer’s individual needs and constraints during the transition.

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities in a data-driven network:

Inventory assurance
Shared risk analysis
Service-to-fiber visibility
Migration planning
Diversity assurance

Network automation

As SDN becomes more distributed over a network, Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller does as well as it is able to communicate with SDN controllers on optical, packet, or IP/ MPLS devices, using the collected data to maintain a stateful view of the network. At this point in the maturity phase, many of the manual processes for service deployment that
take weeks or even months can be replaced by automated, SDN-enabled services, deployed in just minutes.

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities in
network automation:

Automated risk management
Auto-optimization
Bandwidth on demand
Multilayer restoration
Service assurance

Network automation

As SDN becomes more distributed over a network, Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller does as well as it is able to communicate with SDN controllers on optical, packet, or IP/ MPLS devices, using the collected data to maintain a stateful view of the network. At this point in the maturity phase, many
of the manual processes for service deployment that
take weeks or even months can be replaced by automated, SDN-enabled services, deployed in just minutes.

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities in
network automation:

Automated risk management
Auto-optimization
Bandwidth on demand
Multilayer restoration
Service assurance

Full network autonomy

At this stage, Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller becomes an active player in SDN architecture, with fully automated networking that can be configured, optimized, and restored by enforcing specific policies, pooling capacity, and provisioning capacity across domains and different vendors.

With the Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller in place, automation can be accomplished with full service awareness, enabling organizations to achieve their overarching goal of automating end-to-end service creation and assurance.

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities in autonomous networks:

Automated service provisioning
Optical path optimizer
Service-aware restoration
Service-aware optimization

Full network autonomy

Cisco Crosswork Hierarchical Controller capabilities in autonomous networks:

Automated service provisioning
Optical path optimizer
Service-aware restoration
Service-aware optimization

Accelerate your journey to next-generation networking

If your network needs to deliver high-bandwidth services with uncompromising diversity and latency SLAs and dramatically lower costs, you’ll be interested in Cisco’s RON solution with Crosswork Hierarchical Controller.

For more information on Cisco’s network automation portfolio for service providers, please visit www.cisco.com/go/crosswork. To learn more about Crosswork Hierarchical Controller or to schedule a demonstration, contact your Cisco sales representative.