iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 delivers solutions for LSP design, optimisation, network capacity management and service assurance. This new version makes it quicker to get started and easier to use your existing planning and network data sources.

iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 automates operational MPLS processes for fast, error-free delivery of LSP services. Telecoms operators benefit from significant savings in capital expenditure and accelerated planning cycles for far greater insight into the current, and future, capabilities of the network.

iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 integrates with your existing vendor management systems or OSS data sources and is able to support planning scenarios that analyse even the largest MPLS networks.

Compared to planning processes that rely on traditional engineering tools, spreadsheets and databases, iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 users see a range of benefits:

• Transform complexity into simplicity and free your skilled resources
• Planning cycles are reduced from weeks to just a few hours
• Planning becomes more frequent, agile and able to react quickly to change
• Cost-effectively manage multi-vendor assets
• Reduce outages and time-to-restore
• Deliver superior service and network quality

iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 new features include:

• A simple to use Excel interface for importing network data  and forecast service demands
• Configurable user interface menus that allow your automation, analytics and scripts to be executed as easily as core functionality
• Support for the optional Cisco, Alcatel Lucent and Juniper NMS adapters

iVNT MPLS-TE 2.3 can be licensed for deployment on users workstations or centralised server resources. Contact sales@aria-networks.com to learn more and request a demo.

Aria Networks, a leading provider of capacity management and planning software solutions for next-generation networks, today announced the release of Capacity Planner 1.1. New features and deployment options make it even easier for users to quickly import their network data, model forecast customer demand, and plan cost-optimal resource upgrades.

The communications industry is going through a period of technology and service change. Service providers have the opportunity to evolve their network with increasing broadband speeds, 4G mobile services and flexible, capacious Ethernet and optical infrastructure. However the current economy means that capital expenditure on new network resources is not available unless it can be clearly justified both in terms of need and being capable of returning a profit.

Aria Networks Capacity Planner is the only OSS product able to model multi-technology networks, service policies, cost models and market-driven traffic forecasts to produce plans for optimised service design and profitable network upgrades.

Capacity Planner 1.1 further extends Aria Networks’ leadership in network analysis, planning and optimization.

New features include:

• A simple to use Excel interface for importing off-line network data, proposed network topologies, and forecast service demands
• New reports that provide common bill-of-material data on network resources requirements
• Configurable user interface menus that allow custom automation, analytics and scripts to be executed as easily as core functionality
• Deployment options now include quick installation on user workstations for individuals or small teams, as well as maintaining support for shared server-based IT resources

Tony Fallows, Aria Networks CEO, said, “Since announcing the first version of Capacity Planner in early 2010 there has been huge interest in its capability to address capacity management across many fixed-line and mobile use cases. This has led us to focus on making it quicker to deploy and easier to use in order to support the diverse range of service providers and users who need greater insight, control and assurance of their networks’ profitability.”

Since 2005 Aria Networks has been providing solutions for network analysis, planning and optimization. Our customers are able to predict how their network will support service forecasts for the next month, year or five years. Where capacity is needed, they are able to discover which infrastructure meets their needs, when and where it will need to be deployed.

Aria Networks will be at Management World Americas next week. The show runs from November 8th to 10th in Orlando, Florida. Come and find in the Expo or book us for a demo and meeting in our hospitality room.

Why come and see us? There’s plenty of new things to talk about:

• There’s some new Capacity Planner features we’d like to talk to you about which make it quicker to gain insight, control and assurance of your network capacity.
• iForecast 2.0 is making it easy to unlock the value in your OSS and BSS data, performing trend and prediction analytics with just a few clicks of the mouse. No statistics qualifications needed.
• We have new  consultancy offerings that makes getting results from all our planning solutions easier for one-off, occasional or regularly scheduled planning jobs, without the effort associated with owning your own software.

Come and find us on the Expo floor to discuss your latest capacity management challenges.

To prearrange a meeting email us at sales@aria-networks.com

See you in Orlando!

Chippenham, UK – 10^th October 2011

Aria Networks’ expertise in fixed and mobile network capacity management, optimisation and strategic planning is now available as consulting services

Aria Networks, a leading provider of capacity management and planning software solutions for next-generation networks, today announced consulting services that provide the skill and experience to leverage the capabilities of their iVNT, Capacity Planner and iForecast products to deliver rapid, one-off analysis projects. Communications service providers get the benefit of Aria Networks’ products and expertise without the need for capital investment in software and IT resources.

The communications industry is going through a period of technology and service change. Service providers have the opportunity to evolve their network with increasing broadband speeds, 4G mobile services and flexible, capacious Ethernet and optical infrastructure.

There is no universal ‘right answer’ to the question of which network architecture or service types will offer a service provider financial benefits or business advantages. Service providers do have the ability to answer the fundamental questions about their network evolution and service design for themselves. They have the raw data: Service growth figures; Technology capabilities; Equipment costs.

What most businesses are missing is the ability to analyse their data.

Since 2005 Aria Networks has been providing software solutions for network analysis, planning and optimization. Our customers are able to predict how their network will support service forecasts for the next month, year or five years. Where capacity actually is needed, they are able to discover which infrastructure meets their needs, when and where it will need to be deployed.

Tony Fallows, Aria Networks CEO, added: “In telecoms, change is a constant but there are some planning tasks that are one-offs or are funded as an operational expense. At Aria Networks, we’ve built up years of experience in helping operators understand their networks. We are very pleased to be able to offer this expertise for short-term services projects with rapid, high-value benefits”

Typical projects include:

• Mobile Network Planning. Optimal design of back-haul and core networks for LTE roll-out
• Strategic Evolution. Cost/quality comparisons of potential networks topologies, technology and vendors to meet long-term business objectives and service growth
• Network Survivability. Analysis to determine the impact of faults on customer experience and identify efficient solutions

For more information about Aria Networks services visit: www.aria-networks.com/professional-services

Aria Networks will be exhibiting at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, June 21st and 22nd.

The introduction of Cloud services and supporting infrastructure is creating new capacity management challenges for communication service providers, internet service providers and large PaaS/IaaS suppliers. Aria Networks is uniquely able to deliver OSS software to manage strategic resource planning, optimisation and network design that covers all network technologies as well as IT resources and leased services.

Visit us at booth #75 to learn more about how we can ensure your Cloud infrastructure is efficient, profitable and service-ready.

Aria Networks, the provider of capacity management automation and network analytics solutions, today announced iForecast 2.0, offering anyone who can use Microsoft Excel or Aria’s iVNT products the ability to perform sophisticated, accurate trend analysis and predictions.

30 Seconds to Install, 30 Minutes to Learn

iForecast 2.0 is a desk-top application able to automatically discover patterns and relationships  in data sources commonly found in service providers’ OSS and BSS environments. With just a few clicks, historic time-series data or before-and-after sample data are analysed by iForecast 2.0 to build a sophisticated, reusable forecasting model.

Many planners and product managers maintain or manipulate their data using spreadsheets. iForecast 2.0 has been enhanced to work seamlessly with this data to minimise preparation effort, avoid costly integration and ensure users have a simple learning curve before being able to benefit from actionable insight in to their data.

iForecast 2.0 is also tightly coupled with Aria Networks’ iVNT products enabling planning Scenario files to be used as the basis for producing network capacity forecasts. This has the added benefit of allowing the resultant demands, network plans and forecast network traffic to be visualised within iVNT and used as the basis for further planning or optimisation tasks.

iForecast 2.0 builds on Aria Networks’ extensive experience of artificial intelligence to produce a product that is an order of magnitude easier to use than the traditional analytic tools available today. iForecast’s self-learning and self-tuning software removes the need for expert users or a trial-and-error approach to finding the best answer.

Business Advantage in Operations and Business Support Systems

This capability allows service providers to move from having pockets of analytics experts to making forecasting part of day-to-day operational processes, strategic planning and ad-hoc reporting.

iForecast 2.0 can address a broad range of data analysis requirements. Examples include:

• Accurately forecast trends in per-site equipment port exhaustion to ensure you meet procurement lead-times while minimising warehouse stocks
• Predict how the introduction of LTE in a cell-site will impact RAN, backhaul and core capacity needs
• Use historical service and traffic demands to accurately forecast future demands
• Analyse customer propensity to buy, upgrade or churn when introducing or changing service offerings

Tony Fallows, Aria Networks CEO, said, “It’s no coincidence that we’re announcing iForecast 2.0 today, at Management World 2011. In recent years key note speakers at this event have highlighted the need to unlock the value in service providers’ data, to allow smarter business and operational decisions to be made and to provide insight in to customer behaviour. iForecast 2.0 is making it easier for service providers to ask more questions about their customers, network and services, finding answers in the OSS and BSS data they already have in their organisation.”

Press Contact: james.pullen@aria-networks.com

Aria Networks is already gearing up for the TMF Management World 2011 show in Dublin this year. Between May 23rd and 26th, Aria will be exhibiting at Expo booth #14.

This year we expect a bit of a buzz around:

• Cloud. With the industry moving past the ‘what is it?’ stage there will be a focus on how service providers can differentiate themselves from the over the top SaaS and PaaS providers.
• CDN. Telcos will be evaluating the effectiveness of deploying content delivery networks to understand how it will affect their network capacity and service profiles.
• LTE. It’s happening now, but there are still many questions around how it will impact services and what the right capacity and network architecture will be for each service provider.

Come and find us on the Expo floor to discuss your latest capacity management challenges. We will also be supporting a Forumville catalyst project on the subject of Cloud Capacity Management with a number of other OSS organisations. Be sure to check it out.

See you soon in Dublin!

Jay, Aria Networks CTO, explains why Service Awareness and Sensitivity Analysis need to be  at the top of agenda when planning capacity and network change.

With a history of research, development and support I’ve had my fair share of experience with the technical aspects of telco networks: From the elegant structure of the TDM hierarchy through managing optical impairments and IP packet queuing. Such immersion in technology can remove you from what telco networks are really about. It is not about a cool way of transporting Ethernet transparently across an optical network. It is about generating revenue from the provision of services.

Designing a network to deliver services without a clear understanding of those services or even a traffic matrix is to set yourself up for fall. Obviously there are times when the profile of services is unknown but this is not a reason to focus on technology but to be clear and determine what good really looks like.

I am not saying that standards and protocols are not important. What I am saying, though, is when using planning tools to design a network architecture those tools must take into account the services being transported or to be more precise the services should be used to drive the architecture.

So, let’s just assume for now that it is possible to design a network using the services as the input and use revenue, or to be more precise margin, as the goal.  What happens if you get the traffic matrix, forecast or service mix wrong? Well the answer comes back to a previous blog: ‘what does good look like?’. In this instance what good looks like is an estimate of the architecture with bounds which are a result of the service uncertainty.

[DA: Ok you're losing me here. How on earth can you estimate an architecture and even more bizarrely suggest bounds?]

I appreciate this may be a little odd to think of in this way but in reality if we think about the network as a calculator we have at our disposal a number of options; where protection is done, where switching is performed, the type of aggregation, vendor specific topologies or even creation of currently non-commercially available equipment. If ‘good’ means the delivery of services in a cost efficient way then a good planning tool should combine, manipulate, trade off and dimension these options such that we get the required architecture. Furthermore it’s an estimate because there are uncertainties in the service parameters.

An important step in the modelling process is to perform a sensitivity analysis, like a Monte Carlo, to determine the bounds of a solution. To ground this in reality the bounds may be something as simple as the utilisation bounds to something more dramatic like a cost efficient solution that could embrace different architectures like MPLS TP or layer 3 switching and an OTN solution. I have experienced modelling a tier one network where the static service profile suggests a comfortable link utilisation but when a realistic sensitivity analysis is done a much more alarming picture materialises.

The objective of this blog is to suggest when planning a network, be it strategic or tactical, it is important to put Service Awareness and Sensitivity Analysis at the top of modelling agenda. After all, network planning is all about the services.

The ultimate vision here is using a planning tool which takes as its input the services required, desired margin and measurement of uncertainty. The planning tool would then be used to ‘Goal Seek’; manipulating the network so that the margin is delivered within the bounds of service uncertainty. How cool would that be?

A few of the Aria team (James, Paul and Peter) will be attending Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona. We’re all looking forwrad to a great show with lots of debate about mobile data capacity crunch and LTE planning.

If you are also attending, and would like to meet up to chat, just drop sales@aria-networks.com an email, with ‘MWC’ in the subject line, and we will try our best to see you!

Enjoy the show.

Jay, Aria Networks CTO, in discussions with colleagues and with customers, frequently uses the phrase “what does good look like?” when solving a problem.  It’s a simple question that really makes you think. In this article Jay introduces the concept of objective functions, a flexible AI approach to solving network design challenges.

To take an example from everyday life if you were shopping for car insurance what should you consider? The type of cover, excess to pay in event of a claim, courtesy car if you have an accident, legal cover, payment options, and so on. This is where comparison websites come into play. All they are doing is providing you with some options and you have to decide which is best for you. A daunting but manageable task for you because you have some idea of what you are looking for. How would you know what insurance quote to accept? I am sure it is not just the lowest price.

The thought process you would probably go through is:

• I want the lowest price that covers me.
• I am a careful driver so I don’t mind a high excess but a need a car if some idiot prangs me.
• Oh and cash flow is an issue so I want one that I can pay monthly.

That is exactly the thought process that could be encapsulated in an objective function: Minimise cost; cap cost at £X per month; minimise excess; maximise post-accident support.

All objectives are not equal so you might consider cost more than post-accident support, but are relaxed about the excess fees. This means you want to apply different ‘weights’ to the objectives. Some comparison websites provide sliders to tweak key criteria and see the change in price and insurance products. If it were possible to quantify your requirements then a suitably configured search engine could apply your objective function to all quotes and provide you with a ranked set removing the hassle of wading through comparative quotes.

[Devil’s Advocate: The objective function for you may not be the same as for me. What if I don’t want a high excess and I don’t mind paying yearly if there is a discount for a one-off payment?]

That is the beauty about using an objective function. The software that optimises the objective function remains unchanged. Just the components that require to be optimising need changing. We simply have to define what is good for you and what is good for me in clear terms.

So how does this relate to telco networks? Very well it turns out. If we consider the network as a calculator then each calculation, complex as it is, is just an exercise in defining ‘what good looks like’. For service placement on an MPLS network ‘good’ might be low delay, low cost, low average utilisation, and high reliability. For an optical network ‘good’ might be wavelength utilisation, minimising inline amplifiers, maximising signal to noise and maximising power headroom.

As long as the optimisation function is able to modify a solution based on the constituents of the objective function then the underlying computation engine needs no modification other than a definition of the objective function.

One example I like to use with customers that really exemplifies the power of objective-driven artificial intelligence (AI) is one of network and service evolution.  Let us suppose we do a network optimisation and find that we can get a 20% decrease in required network resources by rerouting customer traffic. This is a significant saving so we decide we want to do this, but the difficult question that needs answering now is “how do we get from our current network to our target network”? So let’s ask the question: What does good look like?

This is a useful exercise to go through even if you don’t want to employ objective-driven AI techniques. I might start by saying I want the migration of services to happen in less than five steps. I want high revenue services migrated first and they must always have a backup path with network properties cost, delay and protection equal to original routing with no services  susceptible to a single point of failure, keep transitions regional were possible and finally the end result must come in at least 15% improvement in network resources. This can be crafted into an objective function and the ‘network calculator’ can be exercised using objective-driven AI to evolve optimal scenarios, reporting the best solution. Again the beauty of this approach is that you can easily modify the objective to change the behaviour without changing the software.

Summarising; if you know exactly what you want to do and it is deterministic then go ahead and employ standard linear algorithms, sequential programming or bespoke processing procedures. But if you want something that is robust and highly flexible then use objective-driven AI and don’t forget to ask that all important question:

“What does good look like?”

Jay Perrett, Aria Networks CTO, considers how using artificial intelligence techniques and treating the network as a ‘calculator’ can improve service and network optimization.

As the Chief Technical Officer at Aria Networks I am responsible for encouraging our team to create and see-through new ideas that drive the business forward. I tend to think quite a bit about how we approach problems and can spend ages talking with our engineers, managers and customers about work related issues.

This is my first blog, which really came about because our Marketing Director got fed up with me waxing lyrical to him on the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in network modeling, optimization and capacity planning. So, in the interests of stimulating some new thought processes I have put together a series of blog posts.

Before I go much further I’d like to introduce you to DA (Devil’s Advocate) which is something I use when thinking through problems like this. He has a habit of popping up at just the wrong time and throwing a spanner in the works that makes me rethink an idea.

This first post is concerned with using AI to solve network modeling and optimization. The thought of using AI for anything other than raising sentient machines or clever avatars may be alien to some but really AI is all about applying rules to perform some action or solve some problem without the need for (much) human intervention.

There are many forms of AI and others are much more qualified than I to précis the subject but the area that interests me most, and that employed by Aria Networks, is Evolutionary Learning. This is so cool it’s positively freezing.

Evolutionary programming is a branch of AI where the principles of Darwinian Evolution are used to evolve a modeling process to solve a particular set of problems. In nature it is the 3 S’s; Sex, Sustenance and Successors (I may have just made that up). In computer modeling it could be an objective like; working out the equation of a complex equation, grouping data in sets with similar characteristics or, in the case of network modeling, trying to balance many tens of constraints when placing services across a data network.

For this approach to work its vital that there is some underlying process to model and that is where I come to the crux of my post. In network modeling it is valid to simply think of a network as a calculator. Think of it like this:

• The inputs are the service requirements and network state
• The calculator is the network protocol and the physical rules
• The output is the resolved service

This may or may not seem obvious to you BUT there are two amazing consequences of this hypothesis:

• Computational techniques, like AI, can be applied to network modeling without needing to understanding the detailed message handling or level of detail required by many current modeling solutions
• It is possible to estimate properties like link utilization as a result of service placement WITHOUT having to do a routing exercise

Given that evolutionary programming requires an objective function that defines “what good looks like” and functions to modify solution candidates you don’t have to know how to solve a problem just be able to describe what a good answer looks like. A good example is Dijkstra’s algorithm for IP routing. This is a very efficient algorithm (but not the only one) that can be used to determine the least cost path through a network. A computer programmer could very easily write a program to determine this given a service demand and a network. Suppose now the cost of links changed with bandwidth, this now gets more complicated because of the circular, as opposed the linear nature of the problem. So our programmer has to make a change to the algorithm to get a good result. Then suppose we now need to add delay minimization, load balancing, resource optimization and disjoint paths. Suddenly you have a pretty complex problem and our poor developer gets his CV polished as he can’t work in an environment of constantly changing requirements.

If evolutionary programming was implemented all that would need to change is the simple definition of what good is. In the first two instances above it did not change as we still wanted least cost but the “network calculation” process being modeled changed. For the third example we just had to include a definition of “what good looked like” and no change to the evolutionary algorithms.

[DA: “ok you’ve not convinced me yet. Isn’t an objective function as hard to write as the code that poor developer wrote before he left?”]

Good question but in this case the answer is definitely no. The objective function is simply a way to evaluate different solutions and does not assume a particular solution methodology. So in the case of the 1 and 2 above the same method is used to determine cost: Count up the cost on all the links in the way cost is defined but no change to the evolutionary generation of a candidate solution to check.

So if you think of the network as a calculator and employ AI techniques, like evolutionary programming, quite complex problems can be computed in a robust way, just like nature.

To use this paradigm there are three things you must do:

1.       Determine what good looks like

2.       Generate candidate solutions that (1) can be applied to

3.       Generate candidate solutions fast enough to get an acceptable solution in a timely manner

If you think of nature; (1) is staying alive long enough to pass on your genes to the next generation. (2) is having enough variation in the population to offer ways of combating environmental change and predatory threats and (3) is doing (2) quickly enough to keep abreast of these threats otherwise you finish on the endangered species list!

The same rationale is true with network modeling but (1) is an objective function, (2) is trying alternative routes and (3) is in a timeframe of milliseconds to minutes!

Next time I want to think about what the objective function should be measuring. You might be surprised!

Jay Perrett CTO Aria Networks

This week, one of our sales guys forwarded an article about strategies for dealing with the much discussed ‘mobile data crunch’ (by Patrick Lopez, here). It was a good piece, picking out the usual suspects for the massive growth in mobile data demand, and then setting out five mechanisms for service providers to avoid spiraling costs and plummeting customer experience.

My colleague from Sales asked me: “The five mechanisms are interesting and it’s left me thinking: if Patrick is right, which mechanisms do we fit into?”

I scanned through the article’s list which included, in short, the following approaches to dealing with capacity issues:

1. Cap usage
2. Increase bandwidth, everywhere, from the radio, through the backhaul, to the core
3. Implement deep packet inspection, policies et al to enforce order
4. Offload traffic with femtocells, caches, gateways et al
5. Compress high-demand data, like video

After a little thinking I responded that our products address “all of these, and none of them”.

That answer warranted an explanation of why, in fact, that’s a good thing for Aria and our customers.

Let’s be realistic: ‘Planning’ whether that is OSS software or just taking a few minutes to think before you act, is never the ‘solution’. No. Planning is, instead, an essential part of finding and implementing the right solution.

Without planning you pick the wrong approach and have to start all over again when it fails (if you have that luxury). Without planning you might implement the right solution, but too little or too much of it, again risking failure or overspend.

It seems, right now, that service providers are wrestling with some big, fundamental questions. Rarely a week goes by without another news article or report about the mobile data crunch. Usually these also include the service providers’ options to solve the problem – a recent paper from Amdocs outlined ten such options.

Fixed-line operators, too, have many choices for evolving to a high-capacity IP and optical network. We have been lucky enough to work with Verizon to help them analyze and choose between twenty-four different network architectures.

Planning may not be the solution. But planning is the only way service providers will determine which combinations of options will ultimately deliver an efficient, resilient and cost-effective network.

Aria is uniquely able to help service providers plan for the next five years of their network’s evolution, as well as handling the day-to-day operational planning required to optimize next generation networks and services. Learn more about intelligent planning here.