4 Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager
While IP/MPLS control plane protocols are crucial to
enabling unprecedented cost-effectiveness for rerouting
around failures, the majority of today’s management
applications from other equipment vendors do not
concern themselves with monitoring the operational
state of the control plane, providing topology visualiza-
tion or validating its configuration. The reason for this
management gap is historical.
The first successful, large scale, IP-based networks were
deployed to support residential high speed Internet (HSI)
connectivity. This high volume, low cost, best-effort
service did not warrant the need for sophisticated
management software to track service SLAs. Aside from
an emphasis on using IT methods to flexibly provision
subscribers, IP operations for this type of network relied
on low value element management systems (EMS) to
configure and monitor basic infrastructure.
But the advent of mission critical business services
and service delivery sensitive subscriber services such
as video — all riding over an IP/MPLS infrastructure —
has changed service providers’ management needs.
Simplifying service provisioning, reducing MTTR and
assuring a high quality of service has become paramount.
Alcatel-Lucent responded to this need by introducing
comprehensive element, network and service manage -
ment in one platform — the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service
Aware Manager [Figure 2].
Re-Defining IP/MPLS Management
Figure 2. Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM Provides Element, Network and Service Management in ONE platform
Managing
Physical Hardware
Managing
Customer Service
Managing Logically
Linked Nodes
Service Management
Network Management
Element Management
5620 SAM