Ciena unveiled key enhancements to its Blue Planet network orchestration software.
Ciena’s Blue Planet software helps service providers automate services – from creation to orchestration to delivery – across both physical and virtual domains. Key advancements include:
- Rapid Customization and Agile Development: New container-based, micro-services architecture allows rapid customization and accelerated development of new applications, including those from third-parties and based on open-source. Blue Planet loosely couples software functions within these containers to create and enable SDN Management and Control, NFV Orchestration, and Multi-Domain Service Orchestration. The new architecture also enables disaggregation of the software stack, enabling providers to add their own services.
- Self-Service Programmability: New TOSCA-based service templates equip providers with ‘DevOps’ style self-service programmability of resources (physical, virtual, or cross-domain) for creating, deploying, or enhancing services. This reduces professional services fees typically required by OSS or integration vendors.
- Simplified Integration with Legacy Systems: Support for business process model and notation (BPMN) standard simplifies integration with legacy OSS/BSS systems and simplifies providers’ ability to create, integrate and operate new services. BPMN reduces network complexity and improves the ability to offer programmable, self-service tools to end-users.
- Freedom to Choose: Blue Planet supports non-Ciena domains (e.g. access, metro, core, cloud) to deliver end-to-end service orchestration. This enables providers to select and deploy best-of-breed options at each domain without losing operational simplicity and abstraction. It also reduces vendor lock-in and ensures simple, low-cost operations across multi-vendor physical or virtual functions and domains.
- Open and Standards-based: Blue Planet incorporates more than 15 standards or open source code bases (including Docker, LINUX, TOSCA, BPMN, Netconf/YANG, etc). Additionally, open APIs expose critical data to northbound platforms.
“More than a year ago, Ciena’s Blue Planet division (formerly Cyan), embarked on a journey to break down the software silos that are prevalent in the vendor community. Now, we’re poised to bring together SDN, NFV and service orchestration into a unified, open platform that enables service providers to leverage these cutting-edge technologies for building virtualized on-demand networks and cloud-based service offerings,” stated Mike Hatfield, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Blue Planet, Ciena.