AT&T detailed the DCAE work within its ECOMP initiative as key to its goal of tapping SDN and NFV for greater control over network resources
AT&T’s push into gaining software control of its network has led to a number of innovations for the telecom space, with one of the more recent examples coming from its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy project.
AT&T said the ECOMP initiative, which was unveiled in March, is designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. The carrier had been working on the project for two years, tackling the initiative due to a lack of guidance for network functions virtualization and software-defined networking deployments in a wide area network environment.
As part of the project, AT&T in a blog post recently detailed its data collection, analytics and events component, which it said was a key aspect to the ECOMP program. Mazin Gilbert, assistant VP for intelligent systems and platform research at AT&T Labs, explained DCAE was “responsible for collecting, managing, storing and analyzing data for an ecosystem of control loop automation systems and network and cloud services.”
“Imagine a world where everything is data driven,” Gilbert noted. “Your network is resilient, self-healing and self-learning. You can create, remove and instantly expand smart virtual functions – southbound network devices (i.e. firewalls, routers and switches) or northbound cloud services (customer care, ambient video, virtual reality, ‘Internet of Things”). This is possible with the power of ECOMP and DCAE.”
AT&T said the four main components of DCAE include:
1. Analytics framework, which is a data development and processing platform with a catalog of microservices – stand-alone, policy enabled, elementary analytics functions designed to support structured and unstructured data processing.
2. Collection framework, which is a set of streaming and batch collectors designed to support virtualized network, device and infrastructure data.
3. Data distribution bus, noted as ECOMP’s “blood stream” and designed to enable different components within DCAE and ECOMP to publish and subscribe to data as well as move data from the edge of the network downstream for processing.
4. Persistence storage framework, which is a data storage platform for short-term and long-term consumption.
AT&T said the platform includes an orchestrator and a set of controllers designed to manage the data bus and microservices, and interprets different service designs and workflows, and adheres to an “open source philosophy” allowing developers, third-party providers, data scientists and engineers to contribute to the platform.
Those contributions appear needed, as Gilbert pointed out a trio of challenges remaining with DCAE development, including:
1. Scalability and movement in processing and management of heterogeneous and large-scale data, from structured to unstructured, and messages to events and files.
2. Development, certification and automated onboarding of microservices, which AT&T said are functions typically developed through different environments, teams, languages and styles, “which make it tricky for automated onboarding and certification.”
3. Optimization and orchestration of services by composing collectors and analytics microservices at the edge, central or core of the network to attain efficiency, cost effectiveness, security and reliability.
AT&T recently said it was targeting software control over 30% of network elements able to be migrated from hardware by the end of this year, on its way to 75% control by 2020.
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