Cisco Systems OL-4344-01 manual About Cisco IP Solution Center

C H A P T E R 1

About Cisco IP Solution Center

Cisco IP Solution Center (ISC) is a carrier-class network and service-management solution for the rapid and cost-effective delivery of IP services. IP based services targeted to enterprise customers can represent major revenue opportunities for service providers. Success in this highly competitive market requires the ability to effectively plan, provision, operate, and bill for such IP services.

Deploying and offering MPLS VPN services for enterprise customers requires planning of network resources, deploying, maintaining and finally configuring the network elements and services. This manual procedure can be time consuming and not accurate. A service provider needs to automate all these steps in order to be stay competitive in this high-touch market.

Figure 1-1shows all the major elements and devices that a service provider can employ to fully deploy ISC MPLS VPN management services.

A customer edge router (CE) is connected to a provider edge router (PE) in such a way that the customer’s traffic is encapsulated and transparently sent to other CEs, thus creating a virtual private network. CEs advertise routes to the VPN for all the devices in their site. The ISC provisioning engine accesses the configuration files on both the CE and PE to compute the necessary changes to those files that are required to support the service on the PE-CE link.

Figure 1-1 ISC MPLS VPN Management in the Service Provider Network

Management PE

Service Provider

network

ISC network management subnet

IP Solution	Processing
Center	server

89996

	PE	Management VPN	Management CE
		Collection	Collection
CE 1		server	server
	CE	PE 1	Service provider	PE 2
			MPLS core
CE 2	Multi-VRF
	CE

CE 5 CE 4

CE 3

Catalyst	Catalyst 3550
2950 switch	Ethernet switch

Cisco IP Solution Center, 3.0: MPLS VPN Management User Guide, 3.0

OL-4344-01 1-1