Packet Design, a provider of route analytics designed to enhance network availability and performance, has launched a new application, Explorer SDN Path Provisioning, designed to enable network operators to quickly build and activate the services demanded by customers.
Packet Design’s new Explorer SDN Path Provisioning application automates service path computation leveraging a set of real-time, historical and predictive analytics from its Explorer SDN Platform.
As examples, Packet Design stated that a customer could request a low-latency link from New York to Los Angeles to support voice or video service, or request a geographically constrained service that excludes routers in a certain city, region or country, or an operator may wish to offer a diverse path service for customers requiring a route with no single point of failure.
The Explorer SDN Path Provisioning application enables operators to initiate these services automatically and with the confidence that the best paths are selected for each service. Using the application’s web interface, network providers are able to create a catalogue of transport services offering the characteristics and constraints to meet product management requirements. Operators can then fulfil customer requests using a wizard to define the different services required.
Packet Design stated that the path constraints operators can define include the transport service priority, the optimisation algorithm required, whether RSVP-TE or segment routing traffic engineering should be used, the type of protection, including node, link, shared risk link group (SRLG) or provider edge router diversity, and options to include or exclude nodes, interfaces and SRLG.
The Explorer SDN Path Provisioning application can create policies that specify the devices and links the service traffic can traverse, as well as recovery options. At the click of a button, it can establish the path(s) by passing the configuration data via APIs to an SDN controller or service orchestrator.
The new Explorer SDN Path Provisioning application is included with the currently available Packet Design Explorer Suite version 17.1. Additional new capabilities in this version include customisable dashboards and workflows designed for network engineers and operations teams. Explorer Suite also now features the ability to view the current and previous path for specific service traffic in a single view to aid troubleshooting of network routing issues.
