http://downloads.lightreading.com/wplib/enea/Enea_WP_ArchIntegrPlatform.pdf
Integration approach requires architecturing the system with an approach to support multiple technologies from multiple vendors. This is a powerful statement and it outlines the basic attitude required in going for an integration of the solution. With each vendor bringing best of their products, for integration to be successful it is important to have the mindset to work together with each of them and bring out a competitive solution (e.g., SDP alliance).
Tier 1 NEPs have known for delivering high available network equipment solution handling hardware and software development in house. However to reduce cost & TTM, they are looking at bring-in standard based open COTS building blocks. Value proposition from COTS vendors has been low-cost, low-risk and fast TTM compared with the prioprietary middleware developed by the tier 1 NEPs. But none of these would work if there is a lack of well considered integration paradigm for architecting and executing new network equipment programs. However one can loop up to industry bodies like SCOPE alliance for the inputs and best practices in defining these integration paradigms.
SCOPE alliance (scope-alliance.org) defines scope and requirements of a carrier grade platform (CGP) and it has 7 building blocks – hardware, OS, middleware, application server, O&M and tools. Typically NEPs provide 1 or 2 components of this building block and look to the COTS eco-system for the rest. Here the integration architecture should provide abstration for the proprietary building blocks. However there are certain requirements that the COTS component will have to satisfy before being included in the integration architecture. Most noteable are: redundancy, discovery & inventory management of resources, fault tolerance, component level controls/independence, upgrades & backward compatibility, security and management interfaces.
Pattern for defining integration architecture
- Use 5 parametes – modularity, manageability, interoperability, availability and testability as the 5 key attributes to design architecture
- Clearly define functional, non-functional requirements and integration points at the begining of the integration
Some of the challenges in integration architecture:
- uniform RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability)
- Ensuring each building block has predictable and well defined behavior in terms of timings/latencies, error codes, memory usage etc
- multiple vendor working together to resolve issues during development and in live network
Case study:
- One of the case given by Enea (enea.com) is how a deployable integrated architecture would look like where specialized processing engine (with DSP and NP running applications CODEC, IP forward or VLAN) can work with COTS hardware. This is a classic pattern in most of the telecom applications
