Full-stack platform visibility and service assurance from the chip level on up, says EXFO
EXFO on Wednesday announced a new adaptive service assurance solution, which it says is aimed at helping network operators deliver a better 5G experiences for their customers. The new solution combines EXFO’s existing adaptive service assurance (ASA) platform with Intel platform telemetry, the company said. Combined, operators gain full-stack platform visibility from the chip level on up, so they’ll know if the fault originates in the network, service layers, or in cloud infrastructure. The solution was developed to help answer an emerging need from operators, according to EXFO’s research.
“81% of operators surveyed expect 5G networks will be more difficult to troubleshoot than 4G networks. Similarly, 69% of operators agreed that fault detection and correlation are more difficult in cloud-native networks, with 74% of them citing a lack of sufficient cloud-specific assurance tools forcing them to rely on manual processes,” said the company.
EXFO claims the new solution will “close the visibility gap among cloud-native infrastructure and the network and service layers.”
Operators using the new solution can examine the operational span of their entire networks, right down to the silicon, EXFO claims. The goal is to speed time to resolution and eliminate domain-specific fault denial altogether.
“Network virtualization is an evolutionary path that began in 4G and is now firmly established in 5G,” said Philippe Morin, EXFO’s CEO.
Morin added that managing service-level agreements (SLAs) across domains both virtual and physical present operators with new challenges, especially when that infrastructure is owned by someone. This new solution gives operators the ability to detect, correlate and resolve problems regardless of their location, he explained.
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What’s underpinning this adaptive service assurance solution is Intel’s data center-grade Xeon server processors. The processors combine on-board artificial intelligence (AI) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) accelerators with Intel’s platform telemetry tech. Intel noted that it’s using the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTelemetry project to provide a standard industry implementation for this functionality.
“It enables operators to ‘see’ right into the heart of the foundational platform infrastructure and assess operational metrics, including health, utilization, congestion, power consumption and configuration checks,” said the companies.
Alex Quach, VP and GM, Intel’s Wireline & Core Network Division, noted that service assurance is well understood in mobile network, but “the added dimension of cloud-native infrastructure provides a new challenge for most operators.”
In February, EXFO announced a new collaboration with Red Hat, focused on adaptive service assurance for 5G. Specifically, EXFO’s Nova Active μ-Verifier service assurance solution is now available as a Red Hat-certified container, which can be deployed on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform in hybrid cloud environments.
The combination, the partners said in a release, enables a cloud-native testing platform for visibility of mobile networks from the edge to the core and cloud, for ensuring 5G mobile network performance. EXFO said the value of the certified solution has already been demonstrated in a partnership with an unnamed North American Tier 1 operator network.
Last week, EXFO announced that Active u-Verifier has been tested and validated on the SUSE Rancher container management platform, the open-source enterprise Kubernetes container orchestration system.
