In a more recent piece of analysis published by Heavy Reading and IBM, two of the top three operational concerns of operators embarking on NFV migration were given as first, the immaturity of service assurance solutions for NFV infrastructure and, second, an inability to correlate service impacts with physical or virtual device failures. For those already implementing NFV-based solutions, that inability to identify the source of failures was concern number one.
What does such limited visibility into root cause of failure mean in practice? The shift to NFV is largely being driven by two factors. First, the possibility of introducing and scaling new services quickly, and, second, the desire to increase operational efficiency, such as through enabling faster and lower cost upgrades to network elements.
However, new service launches and upgrades are two of the most important contributors to network outages and performance degradation, so the adoption of NFV in this way is itself likely to result in more outages in the future. As a result, there is an even more pressing need for solutions that provide the required levels of visibility, so that critical migration plans can proceed. In fact, it should be considered a mandatory pre-condition for any such migration.
NFV also promises networks that can scale dynamically, which is an entirely new challenge for service assurance. What does this mean?
To learn more about network impact due to virtualization or VoLTE implementation, register for the upcoming webinar “Can you identify the causes of your IMS network outages?”
