Nakina NI-Controller

The Nakina NI-Controller is a solution that enables automated software audits of network devices against ‘gold standard’ designs in multivendor, multi-technology network environments.

Network service providers are caught in a seemingly insoluble conundrum: the thirst for data volume is unquenchable, new services and media are rolling out faster than ever before, and the complexity of the networks required to serve them – whether LTE, IMS, Ethernet, or fiber access – has never been greater. Yet revenue grows at a far less than commensurate pace, and the human and capital resources available to manage network operations and administration are increasingly limited. More traffic, more services, and more complexity have to be delivered with fewer people, fewer errors, and fewer outages.

One way out of this impasse is a new approach to the management of network integrity. In spite of the quantum leaps made in network architecture and technology, maintaining configuration integrity has remained a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone craft. Design standards for device configuration to support VoIP, a new wireless data app, or an Ethernet backhaul service may be painstakingly developed in the lab, but actual implementation in the field drifts rapidly through error, repair, replacement, and provisioning processes. The only way to achieve consistent network integrity improvement, in spite of the opposing forces of network expansion and operations resource contraction, is to automate the quality feedback loop of network audit, discrepancy check, and gold standard maintenance.

What’s the Impact?

Most network outages can be traced back to manual network change activity.
Typical parameter error rates in a first audit are in a range of 10-20% - a minefield for outages.
“Stare and compare” verification of network device configuration slows outage resolution and delays network upgrade processes – in some cases to the point of impossibility.
New equipment and new software load upgrades are delayed as discrepancies against gold standard designs are validated.

The NI-Controller minimizes the risk of network outages by reducing human errors through sophisticated online auditing and parameter checking. It can scale to support the auditing of thousands of parameters in hundreds of thousands of NEs, eliminating an otherwise insurmountable obstacle to service rollout. The NI-Controller streamlines tedious spreadsheet maintenance with automated table and report creation.

Key Functions

Data Import

Store gold standard data in a common baseline data repository
Import data or manage the life cycle of the gold standard input

Data Collection

Extract real-time settings from NEs

Audit

Compare planning tool reports or templates to live network view, using specified tolerance criteria
Display and report discrepancies
Provide notification of any service-affecting change

Parameter Baselining

Create hierarchical templates of parameters based on groupings
Compare and commit settings across a network

NE Resource Audit

Select by NE or group of NEs
Customize and filter output

Reconcile and Configure

Apply/override network view with planning tool data
Configure specific parameters on specific elements
Re-audit to confirm changes

Nakina’s Integrity Solution

The NI-Controller works together with other components of Nakina’s Integrity Solution to maintain the asset integrity, software integrity, and security of your network. These other components include:

NI-Collector
Mines NEs for physical and logical inventory, which can then be reconciled against network inventory databases.

NI-Guardian
Creates user accounts and profiles that control access to the network devices through a proxy agent, with centralized transaction logging.

The NI-Controller is built on top of the Nakina NI-Framework integrity platform, Nakina’s scalable framework for management applications. The Nakina NI-Framework provides TM Forum, industry standard NGOSS interfaces for upstream integration.

Benefits

Simplifies and accelerates fine-tuning of operational parameters, minimizing mistakes and outages
Fully automates error identification and setting of network-wide parameter values, eliminating manual processes and scripts
Keeps planned and actual NE parameters and inventory in sync, reducing provisioning fallout and stranded assets
Standardizes methods and procedures across a multivendor network

Differentiators

Proven scalability to 10,000s of nodes with network-wide, multivendor coverage of over 100,000 NEs
Secure, fault-tolerant mediation of device communications
Handles device types at every layer of the network (not just Layer 3 routing)
Works with both file-oriented and individually retrievable parameter sets
Rapid adaptation to new device types with minimal programmer involvement
99.999% carrier-grade availability with a distributed, service-oriented architecture
Agentless operation - No software is ever installed on targetted equipment being managed