Ciena’s Blue Planet now packs analytics for deep virtual network insights

blue planet
Credit: Vit-Mar / Shutterstock.com

Ciena says it has added analytics to its Blue Planet portfolio, along with a new app, Network Health Predictor (NHP), that leverages that analytics capability to helps operators anticipate network failures and eliminates service disruptions.

Blue Planet Analytics generates deep network insights through big data to help network operators make smarter, data-driven business decisions. As part of the overall strategy to enable fully autonomous networking via Blue Planet, the new capability and related applications gives operators the ability to visualize and identify trends in order to create more profitable services, better predict capacity requirements, and anticipate potential network and service disruptions before they take place.

Blue Planet Analytics combines analytics with orchestration and policy. It utilizes machine learning on data collected from multiple sources in order to improve the end user experience and simplify network operations.

For example, Blue Planet Analytics and the related NHP app will notify a network operator well in advance if a network element has the potential to fail and requires attention. The network operator not only avoids costly network downtime and decreases repair or maintenance costs, it continues to provide a positive, uninterrupted user experience for customers. NHP is the first in what will be a family of analytics applications for Blue Planet Analytics.

Built on Blue Planet’s open design and extensible micro-services-based architecture, Blue Planet Analytics supports data collection from any source, including multiple network vendors, layers and physical or virtual domains. It can also take advantage of third party big data cluster systems such as Hadoop, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Blue Planet Analytics and the NHP will be available in February 2017.

We’ve long anticipated how today’s emerging trends like 5G, IoT and virtualization would fundamentally change networks and drive new business models,” said Nirav Modi, vice president and general manager of Blue Planet at Ciena. “A natural extension of our Blue Planet software suite, our new Analytics capability and NHP application give operators a powerful mechanism to improve network performance and speed our customer’s transition to a more intelligent, automated, and profitable network.”

“Real-time data analytics is fast becoming a priority for operators:  it is both a source of invaluable insights into network performance, trends and potential issues and an enabler for the improved automation that will allow them to truly gain the benefits of network virtualization and cloudification,” said Dana Cooperson, research director at Analysys Mason. “Operators are signaling strong interest in open operational frameworks that can incorporate analytical applications from multiple vendors in support of intelligent network automation. Ciena’s Blue Planet Analytics leads a broader trend towards vendors incorporating microservices-based, policy-driven analytics into NFV/SDN orchestration and management platforms.”

Be the first to comment

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.