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FUJITSU Network Virtuora NC

The Virtuora platform suite provides an SDN/NFV solution that turns the network into a continuous, innovative service that delivers carrier-grade reliability. This means end-to-end operational automation, service orchestration and network programmability. From a business standpoint, the Virtuora platform is a foundation for building resilient networks capable of self-repair and able to make the fullest possible use of resources and capacity. Perhaps most of all, Virtuora can facilitate moment-by-moment responsiveness to customer needs and set up services in a few minutes rather than hours, weeks or days.

About the Virtuora Product Suite

Virtuora Network Controller (NC) is the platform for a comprehensive, adaptable, highly modular suite of software products that enable you to build and grow a virtualized, programmable network. The Fujitsu Virtuora SDN product suite encompasses control, planning and design, operations and management, and service fulfillment and assurance functions.

How the Virtuora Product Suite Benefits Your Business

Networks based on the Virtuora product suite can help you:

Cut long-term operational and capital costs
Speed up service launch and delivery
Maintain support for current revenue-bearing services
Preserve the useful life of existing network assets
Choose equipment and technology without vendor dependence
Build a resilient network that increases SLA compliance
Improve quality of service and customer experience
Quickly identify, anticipate, and meet customer needs
Open up a rich ecosystem of new revenue opportunities

Virtuora NC - the Control and Management Center of your Network

Built on an open-source foundation such as OpenDaylight or ONOS, Virtuora NC provides a framework for a collection of applications and interfaces that enables the control and management center of the virtual network. This powerful, standards-based software platform delivers a full-featured, lower-cost, scalable environment that extends the capabilities of a basic network controller or even a vendor-proprietary controller.

Component-Based Structure Gives you Freedom of Choice

By separating the applications, controller and southbound interface components, Virtuora NC enables you to rapidly upgrade the controller or even move to another controller platform entirely, with little or no impact to southbound interfaces and applications. This layered functional separation offers complete freedom to choose equipment and software from any vendor-with minimal cost, reduced testing and smooth business continuity.

One Controller, One Control Plane, One Network Vision

Virtuora NC centralizes the network control plane by logically consolidating it into a single software system connected to the diverse devices, tools, and interfaces that make up the network's infrastructure. Regardless of physical location, traffic route or data delivery mechanism, Virtuora NC communicates with and controls network elements automatically, effectively and reliably.

This virtually centralized control plane architecture delivers unified operations and resource orchestration, with universal abstractions that enable global network programmability and automation. Virtuora NC also provides for decision-making based on up-to-the minute information about the characteristics of the network itself.

A Rich Application Ecosystem

Just-in-Time, Pay-as-you-Grow Networking

"Network agility" means meeting fluctuating and often unpredictable demand with a network that’s available precisely when needed, for as long as needed. It also means being able to expand your network rapidly when new demand or opportunity arises. Virtuora NC lets you act fast, scale to meet demand, and "pay-as-you-grow."

Virtuora NC uses software-defined networking to deliver new services to market faster and more economically. It also enables control of management, integration and simplified application administration within a network construct that is dynamic, efficient, scalable, and that promises improved capacity and resilience. With Virtuora NC, you can count on a best-in-class controller that is modular, open, interoperable, and designed to grow with you.

Modular, Standards-Based Architecture

The Virtuora product suite comprises three distinct, functional “layers” of software that interface with each other via open APIs and YANG models.

Application Layer

The heart of Virtuora NC is the rich variety of modular applications that provide the network control functions. Network design, control, management, fulfillment, service assurance, and northbound interfaces are all delivered via the Virtuora applications. Each application provides a set of external interfaces to the controller, data collection and analytics engines, active and available inventory, and next-generation OSSs. Because these external interfaces comply with open REST standards, Virtuora applications can be used with any controller that supports the same open REST standards.

Platform Layer

The open SDN control framework forms the middle layer. Built on OpenDaylight (ODL), ONOS, or a vendor-proprietary controller, the modular nature of Virtuora NC provides for rapid upgrades and migration to other controllers.

Network-Centric Layer

The southbound interfaces make up the foundation layer, which directly enables multivendor equipment to communicate with the network. These interfaces to network elements are abstracted via YANG models and XML. These interfaces also support NETCONF and other management protocols, and provide multivendor support.

Get to Market Faster and More Economically

With Virtuora NC controlling your network, it is quicker and easier to provision new or upgraded equipment into service. Virtuora NC also enables you to knit together heterogeneous devices dynamically. You can holistically provision data centers across distributed networks and virtual environments with automated, vendor-agnostic network elements. The system gets services to market faster and more competitively because it is modular, flexible and simple-bringing diverse, dispersed resources together as a unified, integrated whole. Virtuora NC also Interfaces with the Virtuora Path Computation application (PCE) to build optimal routes for services, ensuring they are highly resilient and quick to restore if an interruption occurs.

Integrating Multivendor Devices and Third-Party Applications

Virtuora NC retains the openness of the platform so that you can seamlessly integrate multivendor devices and develop applications using standard interfaces. The southbound interfaces are described using YANG models and abstracted for simple integration and access by the controller and network applications. All the data stores in the platform database, in addition to other platform services, can be accessed by any application via standardized REST-based APIs and data-modeling. Thus, if you can develop open-platform applications, you can develop and implement applications for Virtuora NC.

Fast, Easy Service Provisioning with High Availability

Includes graphical topology and link views
Provides greater security with role-based user access
Delivers dynamic service activation and end-to-end provisioning
Links dispersed systems and processes automatically
Instantiates services and functions on-demand
Integrates existing, new, and mixed-wavelength services
Supports disaster recovery
Integrates external subsystems with REST interfaces

Transform and Innovate-Continuously and Competitively

A network based on open standards and a modular architecture is able to reinvent itself quickly when needs and opportunities arise. Virtuora NC is built to a service-driven model based on open-source technology. It is part of an ecosystem of current and future network technology that supports cooperative innovation and freedom of choice.

With Virtuora NC powering your network, you can quickly identify and capitalize on your customers’ needs and improve business outcomes by adopting continuous improvement practices in a tightly coupled development/operations organization.

With Virtuora NC, you can:

Escape vendor lock-in with multilayer, multidomain or multivendor networks
Ensure consistent service quality and continuity
Effectively manage and utilize growing amounts of network data
Recover service fast across multiple tiers and vendors
Take advantage of “crowd-sourced” innovation on open-source platforms
Keep costs in check by using open source technology
Do away with configuration tracking and undocumented, localized, manual processes and procedures

Fewer Constraints, More Choices

Real Benefits from a Programmable, Automated Network

Globalized, programmable and automated networks will ultimately become commonplace as a direct consequence of virtualizing the control plane. The result is progressively fewer vendor constraints on both hardware and software; better access to meaningful real time performance metrics and topology data; and reduced dependence on tedious or machine-by-machine local tasks. Virtuora NC organizes and presents easy-to-read routing information for each service and for virtual network operations.

Improve Efficiency and Quality

Fewer time-consuming command line procedures
Less frequent truck rolls
Automation of repetitive tasks
Reduced power consumption when demand is low
KPI data analysis for choke points and fragmentation
What-if analysis for re-grooming services or adding capacity

Expert Integration Services for Custom SDN/NFV Solutions

Beyond the Baseline: Value-Added SDN Services Integration

Fujitsu offers expert support to assist with end-to-end automation and integration of all system elements, including network elements, management functions, controllers and orchestrators.

Verification

Validation testing in a multivendor environment presents complex challenges because of the unpredictable ways in which components from multiple vendors interact, as well as the need to engage different design and engineering groups to analyze issues. As new products are identified for deployment, Fujitsu can conduct validation testing in a secure, vendor neutral laboratory under your direction and control.

Fujitsu takes the lead in developing test plans based on customer requirements, executing the test program, and reviewing final reports with all parties involved. All interoperability testing is structured to ensure the combinations meet all customer requirements and planned deployment guidelines.

Platform Integration

Virtuora NC provides a REST interface supporting all functionality available in a Fujitsu SDN solution. These REST interfaces can be used to integrate into other components within the SDN ecosystem. The Fujitsu team can analyze the systems to be integrated and develop interface mapping to support custom functionality beyond that of the Virtuora platform.

YANG Model Development and Maintenance

YANG modeling is utilized to model behavior between various layers of the SDN solution. As new services and components are added to the SDN architecture, the YANG models need to be updated to include support for these changes. Fujitsu can provide new or updated YANG models based on new service definitions, new or updated equipment, and other changes. The new YANG models can then be used in the SDN environment to provide the new or updated functionality.

Summary of Requirements

Hardware		Standard x86 server
		8 multi-threaded CPU cores (or 16 vCPU)
		32 GB RAM
		200 GB disk (CPU: Intel Xeon E5 series or higher)
OS	Server	Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7.2 or compatible
OS	Client	HTML5-compatible browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome
Platform Architecture		OpenDaylight or ONOS SDN platform for configuration and　provisioning
		Northbound APIs and southbound device drivers
		YANG models
		Apache HDFS (Hadoop) data store
		Apache Spark analytics engine
		Apache Karaf environment with Apache Karaf Cellar clustering
		Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform
Interfaces		Northbound: Shared HTTPS port for GUI and REST API
Interfaces		Southbound: TL1, NETCONF, SNMP, CLI
Clustering		Supported

Documentation

FUJITSU Network Virtuora NC (543 KB)