Atrinet can help CSPs with their Network Virtualization Transformations by enabling the transition, or consolidation, between traditional and new networks quickly, reliably and efficiently.

June 19, 2018

4 Min Read
Reliable Network Consolidation With Atrinet's NetACE

With many service providers in the midst of mergers and acquisitions, there is a need to consolidate network data from multiple multi-vendor, multi-generation network domains, from inventory management systems, from the network elements themselves and even from multiple Excel files. It is essential to have complete confidence in the data before making it part of the reconstructed operational mechanism your business relies on.

This requires huge investments, planning which is often based on assumptions rather than solid facts, long delays in completing upgrades and consolidations, and engineering resources tied up for months or years when their attention is sorely needed for other operating or revenue-generating activities. Even with all this effort and cost, the result is still imperfect because manual processes that take months always have errors.

So What Is Network Consolidation Anyway?
Usually network consolidation reflects a situation where a new strategy takes place, and as part of the execution plan, Operators need to find the "best path" for its execution. The best path may include OSS consolidation, NMS/EMS reduction, making the existing infrastructure multi-vendor, programmable and agile, providing a level of automation and orchestration that meets present and future demands, delivering hybrid services, educating Operations and Engineering Teams to use the new world, and more.

What Is Atrinet's Role In Network Consolidation?
Atrinet is a reliable and experienced independent software vendor (ISV) with a proven track record of delivering complex use cases and projects together with Communication Service Providers' (CSPs) Engineering and Operations teams. We provide a complete suite of products and services for legacy/traditional network discovery and understanding, reconciliation and automation, making traditional networks multi-vendor and SDN-ized, while on-boarding new functionalities and services on the new networks. We help CSPs with their Network Virtualization Transformations by enabling the transition (or consolidation) between traditional and new networks quickly, reliably and efficiently.

How Can Atrinet Help My Business?
When a CSP faces these challenges, Atrinet, through its migration services, offers its extensive industry knowledge empowered with the most flexible technological solutions to lead and carry out critical steps of a migration or consolidation project. Atrinet brings a team of highly skilled Transition Specialists AMS (Atrinet Migration Services) and NetACE — a unique model-driven, DevOps-enabled, network discovery and automation framework to drive the following goals:

  • Lower The Risk
    Empower your consolidation project with a clear vision, methodology and reliable execution delivered by a team of network migration experts, and an intelligent model-driven network discovery and understanding framework.

  • Shorten Project Delivery Time
    Automate the discovery, migration and consolidation activities across your networks and teams.

  • Cut Costs
    Complete complex migration tasks faster and in the most reliable way while using fewer resources.

  • Achieve Exceptional Data Accuracy
    Increase data accuracy and lessen provisioning fallout and time-to-repair thus increasing the overall efficiency of process automation efforts and rollout speed to further reduce operating expenses and improve customer churn.

  • Recover Stranded and Lost Assets
    Minimize network overbuilding and thus reduce capital expenses while ensuring better asset utilization.

  • Pave The Way to SDN-ization (SDN-ize Your Existing Legacy Network Domains)
    Atrinet offers an innovative solution (NetACE SDN-izer) that facilitates turning legacy non-standard network equipment into programmable SDN-speakers extending the lifecycle of the existing networks while enabling the highest level of automation and agility.

Atrinet uses the NetACE framework, hundreds of ready-made vendor libraries and methodology in order to:

  • 1. Discover and Understand Your Networks and Services
    Before any consolidation project, an existing network should be discovered such that it includes all its physical and logical resources and provisioned services. You must know and understand your network to avoid any surprises and produce a truly reliable and executable consolidation plan based on what’s really out there and not based on old documentation from multiple and often inaccurate databases and Excel files managed across different teams. This is particularly true when consolidating the network of another operator because there is no clear idea of what, if any, data sources can be trusted, a situation that not only increases the cost of the project and jeopardizes its delivery schedule but puts the entire project at risk.

    2. Enrich the Discovered Data From a Network with Non-Discoverable Attributes
    Obviously not all details can be discovered from the network, so data enrichment must take place in order to retrieve non-discoverable attributes from existing inventories and databases and merge them with the reliable data discovered from the network. A good example of such an attribute is the "location".

    3. Analyze Existing Network and Make It Consolidation/Migration-Ready
    The discovered/enriched data must be analyzed from the point of view of "Is it right?" and "Is it needed?" and cleansed of all clutter before importing the data to your new consolidated inventory.

    4. Load The Reliable Inventory Data To a Consolidated Inventory
    Now reliable inventory data can be loaded into your consolidated inventory system and serve as a single source of true information for efficient service fulfillment, assurance and inventory management.

— Yuri Denisov, Vice President, Product Management, Atrinet

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