Cisco Makes Changes to Its Network Services Orchestrator Technology

Network giant Cisco took advantage of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) to announce a new feature of its Network Services Technology (NSO). The feature, known as the Layered Services Architecture (LSA), is designed to increase horizontal scalability and performance on the company's service orchestration platform. MWC 2017 is running this week - February 27 - March 2 - in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

The goal of LSA is to give vendors the ability to manage up to 1 million devices connected to a single network at a time, according to the company.

"As service providers look to the demands of cloud networking, their legacy tools and management processes extend to a breaking point of scalability and complexity," the company said in a statement. "Cisco NSO with LSA gives service providers the ability to manage more than a million devices on their networks."

 Network Automation for Service Providers

Cisco's NSO service is designed to help enterprises automate network functions and streamline operations. Many service providers use the NSO platform to automate services in both traditional and virtualized networks, often in situations involving multivendor networks, according to the company.

Network automation can enable service providers to reduce activation time from months to minutes, Cisco said. It also enables enterprises to create, modify and delete services in real time using transaction-based data models and network changes.

The ability to make changes to a network instantly, modify services and reconfigure devices during live production is another important feature of network automation, especially when it comes to maintaining a constant service and uptime.

NSO enables enterprises to automate more than 50% to 70% of their customer workflows, while delivering complete lifecycle management to design, upgrade and eliminate network services, Cisco said.

More than 10 billion devices

But that proposition has become more difficult as the number of networked devices has skyrocketed in recent years. According to the Mobile Mobile Visual Networking Index Forecast, more than 10 million devices are expected to be networked by 2020.

Meanwhile, mobile data traffic is expected to reach up to 49 exabytes, which puts pressure on networks of cloud service providers, companies and vendors, according to the forecast.

LSA, however, should help alleviate those problems, the company said. "Since its inception, NSO has helped our customers meet changing customer demands while driving revenue growth and reducing operational concerns by implementing and managing new services," said Charles Stucki, vice president and general manager of NSO. Network Function Virtualization Business Unit, In the statement.

With the new LSA feature, Cisco aims to continue to meet the needs of its customers by solving network scalability problems as devices and connections grow in the coming years, he said. Cisco has yet to announce when LSA will be deployed on the NSO platform.