Metro Edge

I recently started watching the “Downton Abbey” series, which takes place in the second decade of the twentieth century.  The characters are facing massive changes in their lives due to the rapid evolution of technology, including the growing presence of cars, phones and electricity.  Very quickly the characters will go from viewing these inventions as alien intrusions to being necessary parts of the infrastructure of daily life.  They will change how they think.

In previous blog entries I have covered some of the aspects of applying the cloud to the problem of telecom services.  In this segment I close the loop and talk about how we can apply the concepts previously discussed.  As with the characters in Downton Abbey, making this transition will require us to change how we think.

In previous blog entries I have talked about applying cloud and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) principles to the edge of the network.  In this entry I will talk about why these principles are important and how they can benefit the service provider.  These benefits fall into three categories related to services:

• Service creation – The process of defining, implementing, and marketing new services
• Service activation – The enabling of a service instance when ordered by a customer
• Service assurance – The measurement and reporting of compliance with the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

In a previous blog entry I discussed some of the technology enablers that led to the success of the cloud, and how they could be applied to other domains such as the metro edge portion of the network.  One key enabler is the use of virtualization and Virtual Machines (VMs) to build the infrastructure of the cloud, which leads to the question, “Can virtualization be applied to the metro edge of the network?” Before digging in further, let’s step back and understand some of the key points of virtualization: abstraction and separation/layering.