Innovation to Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) Offers Service Providers Future Horizontal Scalability

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – March 1, 2017— With more than 10 billion devices and connections projected by 2020, according to Cisco’s Mobile Visual Networking Index Forecast (2016-2021), service providers will need the scalability and performance to manage the high growth of devices in their networks.

Cisco announces today, Layered Services Architecture (LSA), an innovation to the Cisco® Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) enabled by Tail-f, will pave the way for service providers to support the next order of magnitude of devices in their networks. The more than 100 existing and new customers that have adopted NSO’s technology will benefit from the future horizontal scalability and performance enhancements to the industry’s most advanced and flexible service orchestration platform.

As service providers look towards demands of cloud-scale networking, their legacy management tools and process are stretched to a breaking point of scalability and complexity.  Cisco NSO with LSA gives service providers the capability to manage over one million devices in their networks.

Service providers, cloud providers, and enterprises are increasingly adopting Cisco’s NFV solution, NSO, for its unique capabilities to:

• Work in multi-vendor environments with the industry’s broadest set of proven orchestration interoperability capabilities, spanning over 50 network equipment vendors and up to 100 device models today.
• Offer a model driven approach— NSO allows customers to create and change services using standardized service models without the need for time-consuming custom coding or service disruption.
• Automate more than 50 to 70 percent of customers’ operations workflow.
• Offer full life cycle management for designing, updating, and deleting network services faster and easily.

“Since its inception, NSO has helped our customers meet their customers’ changing demands, while driving revenue growth and reducing operational concerns when deploying and managing new services,” said Charles Stucki, vice president and general manager of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Business Unit, Cisco. “With our new innovative NSO feature, LSA, we want to continue to meet the needs of our customers by solving scalability concerns in the network as devices and connections increase over the next few years.”

In addition to strong customer growth in the past few years, NSO’s partner ecosystem is backed by engagement of our 45 vetted and trained Advanced Technology Provider Program (ATP) channel partners and strongest multivendor support with over 100 Network Element Drivers (NEDs).

Some of Cisco’s innovative service provider customers and ATP partners have realized the benefits NSO’s capabilities including:

Key Service Provider Customers

• TelePacific Communications: “In collaboration with Cisco we have progressed to a more virtualized and automated environment to efficiently deliver more services to our customers,” said Jared A. Martin, Vice President, ITx Managed Services, TelePacific. “Cisco’s NSO has allowed us to develop, deploy and manage services to run smoothly in our virtual and physical environments.”
• Telstra: “Cisco NSO has been a critical enabler for Telstra on our path to building the next generation of network technologies on a purely SDN/NFV architecture,” said David Robertson, Director Transport & Routing Engineering, Telstra. “We are now able to provide new network services to our customers faster, with enhanced resiliency and automation across our network.”

Key Cisco Authorized Technology Provider Partners

• Itential: “NSO continues to expand its leadership in the orchestration market with extended scaling options enabled by LSA and its YANG driven, multi-vendor strategy,” said Christopher Wade – CTO, Itential.  “Itential is focused on leveraging NSO and programmable networks to build innovative Pronghorn solutions that drive model-driven automation for Network Operators.”
• NIL: “As a Cisco ATP partner, our vision to provide our customers with comprehensive multivendor orchestration solutions led us to Cisco NSO as the best available framework,” said Dejan Miletic, Director, NIL.  “We help customers design and deploy solutions with end-to-end orchestration using Cisco NSO. The biggest advantage of Cisco NSO technology is the operational optimization and ease of providing new services. Compared to legacy management platforms, Cisco NSO is also more flexible and tuneable with its YANG based modeling approach and is extremely scalable with the new Layered Service Architecture.”
• WWT: “Through its model-driven approach, NSO allows both our Service Provider and Enterprise customers to quickly deliver and adapt services in complex, multi-vendor environments including both physical and virtual network functions,” said Joe Wojtal, Vice President of SP Solutions, World Wide Technology (WWT).  “NSO with LSA ensures that our customers service orchestration needs will be met even as the number of network functions required to deliver a service, both physical and virtual, grows rapidly.”

Supporting Resources

• Cisco Network Services Orchestrator
• Cisco Service Provider business
• Cisco Authorized Technology Provider program
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