Enabling Closed-Loop Network Automation
Automation is becoming the dominant strategy for supporting the increasing complexity in modern networks. As organizations progress on their automation journey, building confidence and trust in the network is paramount. Itential’s Automation Platform provides a low-code, drag-and-drop interface for rapid automation as well as pre-built use cases for the most common operations tasks and use cases. The Forward Networks platform enables network operations engineers to verify that the automated workflows are correct and compliant with intent policies. Integrations with change management systems such as ServiceNow and JIRA, ensure common operational knowledge as well as integrating with notification and source of truth systems to support distributed and cloud environments.
The Importance of Automation for the Cloud Edge & Data Center
Prior to 5G, service providers typically deployed mobility applications using centralized or regionalized data centers (2-8 datacenters), with mobile edge computing (MEC) becoming an attractive deployment model to deliver high performance, low latency services to 5G customers, the number of sites that will house mobility applications will grow into the thousands. The older methods of manually configuring network infrastructure and mobility applications cannot scale to support the MEC model for two reasons – first, the applications provided by the large network equipment providers are complex to manage and configure, and second, the amount of network configuration required to interconnect the applications increases by more than 1000x due to the number of MEC sites being deployed. The only viable options for service providers are to select products that provide performance and programmability and to move from manual configuration of the network to full lifecycle automation.
About Itential
Network Automation & Orchestration
Itential simplifies and accelerates the deployment and automation of multi-domain, multi-vendor network infrastructures. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code, cloud-native solution that seamlessly connects to any IT system, cloud, or network technology for end-to-end automation of any network use cases, making it an ideal solution for automating and orchestrating advanced capabilities like 5G Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) creation and 5G network slicing.
About Kaloom
Cloud Edge Networking
Kaloom is delivering a fully programmable and automated cloud-native data center networking software solution that is disrupting how distributed cloud edge and data center networks are built, managed and operated by Telecom, Fixed and Mobile Operators, Data Center and Cloud Service Providers. Kaloom comprises technology veterans with proven track records of delivering large-scale networking, analytics, and AI-based solutions for the world’s largest networks.
Itential + Kaloom: Making 5G Network Slicing a Reality
The Itential + Kaloom partnership enables service providers to quickly and efficiently deploy the Kaloom Cloud Edge Fabric and to automate the integration of the Cloud Edge Fabric-enabled site into the service provider’s network and cloud environments, creating an end-to-end, automated infrastructure, capable of delivering advanced capabilities such as 5G network slicing.
Integration of Itential & Kaloom
By integrating the two platforms together, customers can now:
- Automate creation of virtual network fabrics.
- Create layer 2 and layer 3 IP networking on the fabrics.
- Configure the IP networking to interwork with the other network elements within the MEC site and connect to the service provider core network.
- Automate configuration of the 5G UPF, including creation of network instances and 5G network interfaces.
- Automate of interworking with interconnect or public/private cloud providers.
- Automate testing and validation for MEC site and internetworking.
- Automate notification and integration with orchestration systems.
Use Cases
Top use cases and examples of the integration:
Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) and Edge site deployment
- Deploy the Kaloom Cloud Edge Fabric to establish the site network infrastructure.
- Deploy the Kaloom 5G UPF (user plane function) running as one of the Containerized Networking Functions.
- Establish and test network connectivity between the MEC site and the service provider’s network.
5G Network Slicing
- Establish secure network path with guaranteed quality of service (5G network slice) from the MEC site, through the service provider’s core network, and into cloud, datacenter, or enterprise network.
