Simulate How Taking Down a Resource Would Impact Both IP/MPLS and Optical Layers
For most service providers, the IP and optical operations are often not coordinated. As a result, maintenance activities in one layer often happen without the operations team of the other layer being aware. Since outages in the IP/MPLS layer tend to span a large geographic area, two seemingly disparate activities in faraway parts of the network can together cause unanticipated traffic impact.
The problem can sometimes be mitigated by using maintenance windows in the middle of the night, but anecdotal evidence suggests that such procedures do not work well.
Sedona’s multilayer NetFusion Intelligence and Automation Platform is ideally positioned to help with its full visibility into both layers and how they are mapped together. It receives up-to-date IP traffic measurements from the IP/MPLS controller, and maintains a list of current failures and maintenance activities for each layer. Putting all this together, it can assess the impact of a maintenance activity by simulating the behavior of the IP/MPLS layer given the current traffic and outages. It then indicates whether the operator should go ahead with that activity.
Sedona’s Automatic Coordinated Maintenance App allows careful coordination of this process so that traffic is hitlessly diverted away from the resources about to go under maintenance.