Telco rebrands cloud operations to keep track of new uses, such as container-to-service
VMware announced the general release on Thursday Guaranteed Telco Cloud service, A part of the company’s Telco Cloud platform. Former Telco cloud operations have been rebranded by VMware to better reflect its evolution, the company said. VMware Telco Cloud Service assures new uses, including Assurance Container-in-Service (CaaS) Assurance, 4G and 5G Mobile Core and Radio Access Network (RAN) assurance.
VMware assures telco cloud services as a way to reduce the operational cost and complexity of Network Operations Center (NOC) and Service Operations Center (SOC).
Everything is handled through “Fault Management, Performance Management, Service Management, Root Cause Analysis and Glass Single Blade for Service Impact Analysis in Multi-Vendor, Multi-Cloud Environment”.
VMware further notes that the solution plays a modern data collection framework with a cloud-native architecture and a leading focus on digital network transformation. The solution can collect data from third-party monitoring tools and supports an ETSI-Standard Network Function Virtualization (NFV) -SOL interface for integration with other standard-based orchestrators.
The platform can discover and link resources on campus and in the cloud to provide topology maps that show both physical and logical connections and relationships between infrastructure and software. Results are rendered in real-time to make it easier for operators to visualize the root causes of network failures or problems.
VMware states that Telco Cloud Services Assurance provides 5G cores and RAN assurance end-to-end monitoring across all domains. It can help CSPs meet the multi-vendor challenge to explore open RAN and virtual radio access network (vRAN) architectures.
“VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance uses a rich set of data collection techniques to collect error and performance data from the RAN. Data is collected from the transport network and physical hardware using that built-in collector. [Virtualized Infrastructure Manager] And CaaS data is obtained from VMware vRealize operation. A new Kafka collector receives fault and performance metrics from the RAN Element Management System, ”the company said.
Other new features in the new release include third-party data ingestion support, support for Data Lake, RESTful API support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) installations, alarms and topologies, and more.
History of VMware Service Confirmation
VWware’s service assurance aspirations crystallized again in 2018 when the company – still a Dell subsidiary – acquired Dell EMC’s service assurance team. The company announced its Smart Assurance Solution with Selvice the following year, further strengthening its portfolio by acquiring Ohana in July.
VMware saw the opportunity to ensure a basic service to tackle emerging 5G business models using zero-touch networking and advanced network automation tools aimed at self-configuration, optimization and even self-healing.
“Now you’re moving to a much more dynamic approach for sure,” said Gabriel de Piazza, VMware’s VP at the time. Moving to 5G requires a roadmap for services such as network slicing, which requires that dynamic assurance system, he noted.
