Cisco has brought automated services functionality to its SDN and NFV platform, allowing operators to view and control functions across multi-vendor networks.
The vendor said its WAN Automation Engine can allow operators to produce “bandwidth on demand” by scheduling bandwidth and avoiding congested network paths. The product uses legacy traffic information to produce predictive models for networks, offers a real-time view of the network by collecting traffic, equipment and topology data and also allows networks to reconfigure path calculations on the fly, which it said makes the network run more smoothly.
Cisco claimed automation could lead to a 90 percent return on investment after its first 12 months of deployment and reducing total cost of ownership by up to 45 percent.
The vendor said this virtualised product could help operators cope with the project explosion of data consumption of an almost 11-fold increase during the next four years. It added the solution makes it easier for operators to get an overview of capacity and what services are using what bandwidth across the network.
Gee Rittenhouse, Vice President of Engineering at Cisco, commented: “As the network grows in size and complexity, service providers must continue to roll out new services and focus on optimising the network, Cisco is committed to providing a complete portfolio of virtualisation offerings to help reduce costs and add even greater value by enabling increased agility and elasticity.”
The solution sits within Cisco’s Mate software product, which offers network planning, design and traffic management. More than 60 operators have deployed Mate worldwide.
Infonetics recently predicted that more than half of operators will deploy a SDN solution by the end of 2014. More than 90 percent of operators are looking to deploy SDN and NFV products in the longer term.
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