Simplify service delivery on combined Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent networks.
In today's increasingly competitive market, maximizing business efficiency and agility is crucial to service providers' long-term success. In the service fulfillment space, this means rapidly introducing new and innovative services. However, this can be complex in today's mixed network environments. Typical service provider networks consist of multivendor network elements and management systems, integrated with a variety of OSSs/BSSs.
Design and fulfillment of services that span these network elements can quickly exceed the capabilities of the individual management systems. Operators must rely on complicated, manual, error-prone processes or complex scripting that requires ongoing updates. Over time, the time it takes to build out a service - as well as the associated development cost - multiplies exponentially.
Furthermore, any upgrade or change necessitates manual intervention by highly skilled resources. Ultimately, service assurance and the ability to offer a consistent subscriber experience are at risk. Service providers need an automated, flexible, extensible design and provisioning process for services that span multivendor networks.
Product Overview
Cisco Prime™ Fulfillment Multivendor Service Orchestration (MVSO) eases insertion of Cisco® equipment into an existing Alcatel-Lucent network by minimizing integration effort, operating expenses, and changes to existing operations. Service providers can speed time to market by automating the provisioning of Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) services across Cisco/Alcatel-Lucent networks.
Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO preserves the service provider's existing investments in infrastructure, network management systems, and processes. It is designed to fit easily into an existing OSS architecture and integrate with platform components with minimal disruption - for reduced time to deploy and lower total cost of ownership. It uses the provisioning mechanisms provided by each vendor's network management system.
By seamlessly integrating with these systems, the solution provides orchestration of end-to-end service delivery across network regions and across Cisco and Alcatel equipment. This equipment includes Cisco ASR 9000 Series and ASR 903 Series Aggregation Services Routers and Alcatel-Lucent 7750, 7210, and 7705 Service Routers, with easy extension to additional Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and other vendor devices.
The solution enables business agility with a standards-based approach, including:
• Predefined and pretested service components that serve as reusable building blocks, helping to enable quick construction of service variations and new product offerings
• Adapters for repeatable, automated integration with the network management systems
• A preassembled Ethernet-line (E-line) service workflow for Cisco/Alcatel-Lucent networks
• The ability to reduce swivel-chair integration by orchestrating multiple service components in response to a single service order
A standardized object model with a single operational client provides a consistent view of all services and resources across all equipment types. And extensibility for both device support and provisioning-related functions simplifies the process to upgrade or extend services that span multivendor networks.
Benefits
Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO:
• Significantly accelerates time-to-market for new services that span Cisco/Alcatel-Lucent equipment
• Reduces order to cash times by automating end-to-end service delivery
• Accelerates time to value of new Cisco equipment
• Lowers operational expenditure through automation of service delivery business process logic
• Increases customer satisfaction and reduces subscriber churn by streamlining and reducing errors in the service provisioning process
Features
Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO provides:
• Vendor-agnostic models with adapters for Cisco Prime Carrier Management and Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM. This provides the ability to provision consistent services across Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent equipment.
• Comprehensive inventory of customers, services and their related physical and logical resources, synchronized with the network through regular discovery, along with discrepancy reporting. This accurate view of the network helps minimize order fallout caused by outdated offline inventory and helps enable optimal service assurance by providing the link between customer, service, and resources.
• Easy and fast solution deployment through
– Simple customization for specific service implementations.
– Discovery of existing resources and services.
• A single pane-of-glass for provisioning and operational management.
• A comprehensive northbound API for flow-through integration and standards-based, vendor-agnostic models for services and resources. These models are based on widely adopted industry standards including those from ITU, IETF, TM Forum, and MEF. This standardization simplifies the task of integration with other OSSs, network management systems, and element management systems and helps enable new services and technologies to be added efficiently.
Recommended Minimum System Specifications
Table 1 lists recommended minimum system specifications for Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO.
Table 1. System Specifications
Component
Recommendation
Operating System
Server: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 or greater
Designer Client: Windows 7
Server
Recommended minimum for production deployments:
• Cisco UCS C200 M2 with 2 x Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 multicore processors or equivalent 8 GB of memory and
10 GB of disk space.
It is recommended to host the Database and Application Servers on separate virtual machines or servers
Designer Client
A PC/laptop with an Intel/AMD dual/multi-core processor with a minimum of 1 GB of RAM and 25 MB of disk space.
Network Management Systems
Cisco Prime Provisioning Version 6.5 (ships with Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO)
Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM Release 10.0 R7 (with easy extension to other versions)
Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco Services, see Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
