Alcatel-Lucent manual Solving Control Plane Operational Issues with the 5650 Cpam

Solving Control Plane Operational

Issues with the 5650 CPAM

Service providers offering business critical services and delivery sensitive residential applications such as video can’t afford to let their customers down. Their reputation for consistent service delivery quality and adherence to SLAs is crucial. Since IP and MPLS provide the control plane technology that allows services to be rerouted around failures, leaving this critical technology unsupervised and manually operated can lead to unintended SLA violations. In addition, relying on scarce IP routing experts to provision and troubleshoot the MPLS infrastructure and services is not efficient for mainstream operations.

The Alcatel-Lucent 5650 CPAM offers routing archi- tects and network operators an effective tool that can be used to isolate and resolve control plane problems, and understand the impact of control plane changes on services [Table 1].

The 5650 CPAM delivers this functionality based on real-time control plane information provided by the Alcatel-Lucent 7701 Control Plane Assurance Appliance (CPAA). The 7701 CPAA is a route listening and route processing hardware device that non-intrusively participates in routing plane signaling. It is based on Alcatel-Lucent’s proven and evolving service router operating system (SR-OS).

Table 1. Solving Service Provider Issues with the 5650 CPAM

C U S TO M E R I S S U E	H O W T H E 5 6 5 0 C PA M A D D R E S S E S T H E I S S U E
Error-prone and time-consuming	Graphical control plane topology validation and diagnosis
manual verification of control plane
configuration and topology

B E N E F I T S

Accelerates verification and troubleshooting of the control plane and reduces service MTTR and ability to offer stricter SLAs

Services are sometimes impacted by routing changes that are invisible to network operations

Lack of simple control plane tools inte- grated with service and network views impede network operators from resolv- ing service/MPLS provisioning fall-outs and service failures related to the control plane; operators must rely on highly- paid and scarce IP routing resources

Proactive control plane surveillance and instant visualization of control plane, IP and MPLS path changes

5620 SAM SLA monitoring integrated with 5650 CPAM MPLS tunnel monitoring for instant impact analysis of tunnel changes on service delivery

Simple graphical representation of the control plane topology and diagnosis tools

5620 SAM service (Layer 2 and 3), MPLS tunnel and OAM trace overlay on the 5650 CPAM control plane topology view

Proactive control plane change detection and impact analysis enables service providers to offer stricter service SLAs

Enables the service provider to cost- effectively scale operations by enabling network operators to understand the relationship between service/tunnels and the control plane in order to resolve provisioning issues, without the help

of scarce IP experts

Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager 3