Ciena’s has enhanced the functionality of its Blue Planet software environment with the addition of Blue Planet Analytics, which generates deep network insights to help network operators make smarter, data-driven business decisions.
Integrating network analytics with orchestration and policy systems, Blue Planet Analytics helps operators to continue on the path to a more autonomous network and is a strategic evolution of Ciena’s Blue Planet software suite, the company says.
Blue Planet Analytics is a robust and flexible software framework for collecting and normalizing data from any source across the network, and integrating with upper-layer analytics applications available from Ciena or from third parties. It uses machine learning on data collected from multiple sources.
The new capability and related applications will give 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.
Applications running on top of the Blue Planet Analytics framework will provide specific services. For example, Network Health Predictor (NHP), the first application to be introduced, helps operators anticipate network failures and eliminate service disruptions. The NHP application analyses network data and will notify a network operator well in advance if a network element has the potential to fail and requires attention.
NHP is the first in what will be a family of analytics applications for Blue Planet Analytics.
“Real-time data analytics is fast becoming a priority for operators,” commented Dana Cooperson, research director, Analysys Mason. “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. Ciena’s Blue Planet Analytics leads a broader trend towards vendors incorporating microservices-based, policy-driven analytics into NFV/SDN orchestration and management platforms.”
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. The benefits of Blue Planet Analytics are also available “as a service” through Ciena Specialist Services.