Changes in the last decade

The volume and rapid rate of changes to IP-based services have officially hit a tipping point.

During the first three decades of the internet, IP-based applications were niche and best-effort, in terms of service performance. IP equipment vendors dictated a service provider's ability to support new and emerging applications within closed and proprietary protocols.

Over the last decade, Internet Content Providers (ICPs) have disrupted the traditional notion of a network. To provide an optimal efficiency of content delivery mechanisms, they leveraged the most advanced connectivity and automation technologies across their storage and compute data center assets. Modern networking approaches, like Ciena's Adaptive IP™, offer more efficiency and flexibility than traditional network solutions by leveraging similar technologies.

Modern IP vs. legacy IP

To meet rapidly shifting demands, successful IP networks must be open, programmable, automated, and virtualized. They must also be rapidly reconfigurable, without requiring human intervention, to enable existing, new, and emerging services.

There are three major factors driving the need for modern, flexible, and adaptable IP networks:

First, cloud-based applications like Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Gaming, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Enterprise collaboration tools require more than just high-capacity services. They also require low-latency, high-availability, and the ability to enforce strict SLAs in near real-time. This drives the adoption of high-performance network architecture that moves applications and key network functions from a centralized location and distributes them at the network's edge. Technologies like 5G and Edge Computing will be key to deliver new levels of required performance and must be highly scalable to address the exponential and unabated growth in IP endpoints towards the network edge.

Second, it’s also important to note the shift in the customer perception of value beyond just basic network connectivity and towards a more holistic overall Quality of Experience. Modern customers, both humans and machines, require applications to support their business operations, communicate with co-workers, family, and friends, and to operate their lives at maximum efficiency. And if their connectivity services fail to deliver on all fronts? Expect a Service Provider switch.

Finally, the third driver behind the widespread adoption of new IP-based applications is the high cost of the constant capacity and platform upgrades that keep legacy networks functional. Constantly adding more IP protocols might is a stopgap that results in making network operations overly (and needlessly) complex, heavily dependent upon manual-intense processes, and slow to react to everchanging market dynamics. Plus, scaling to new and emerging demands in a cost-efficient manner becomes near impossible.

It’s clear that the traditional, box-centric way of building and scaling IP networks is simply unsustainable. An IP network that cannot rapidly evolve in design, deployment, maintenance, and operations now represents a major risk to businesses and their future viability.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The key to succeeding in today’s hyper-competitive market lies in a full network evolution strategy. That’s where Ciena’s Adaptive IP comes in.

Ciena's Adaptive IP is an intelligent and programmable service delivery platform that supports existing services and applications while also setting the stage for new and emerging use-cases, including 5G, business services, edge cloud, and IoT applications and use-cases.

What is Adaptive IP?

Adaptive IP is an innovative approach that offers the standards-based IP capabilities required to support existing, new, and emerging applications and use-cases offering network operators the benefits of cloud-like scale, disaggregated functionality, and data-driven intelligent automation.

Adaptive IP leverages Ciena's Adaptive Network™ architecture vision to unite disaggregated and programmable routing, switching, and virtual infrastructure with a Software-Defined Networking-based control driven by machine learning-based analytics and automation based on real-time streaming network telemetry.

How can Adaptive IP benefit your company?

Ciena's Adaptive IP is an intelligent and programmable service delivery platform that supports existing services and applications while also setting the stage for new and emerging use-cases, including 5G, business services, edge cloud, and IoT applications and use-cases.

Ciena's Adaptive IP approach is based in three core elements that can be implemented together or independently to create a highly effective and efficient IP network evolution strategy:

1) Programmable Infrastructure

Ciena's Routing and Switching portfolio is the ideal infrastructure to evolve towards an open, flexible, and scalable IP network, from access to metro, thanks to its programmable capabilities.

Ciena's unique and field-proven Service-Aware Operating System (SAOS) provides intelligence and operational data for next-generation networks through technologies like Segment Routing, which enables network-level programmability via open industry standards.

Additionally, Ciena's SAOS is evolving towards a disaggregated architecture and offers the capabilities required to progress network evolution by leveraging a modern microservices-based architecture and container-based software architecture that decouples software from hardware.

2) Software Control and Automation

Another benefit of Ciena's Adaptive IP is Ciena's Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller providing centralized, software-defined multi-layer control. MCP offers rapid creation, deployment, and automation of end-to-end service delivery across both physical and virtual domains. MCP also facilitates network evolution towards emerging digital services for businesses and consumers— a major element of Ciena's Adaptive IP approach.

3) Analytics and Intelligence

The third major element of Ciena's Adaptive IP is the cutting-edge analytics, intelligence, and insights provided by the MCP Adaptive IP Apps, which address a fundamental IP/MPLS management gap by providing real-time visibility into how routing behavior affects service delivery.

Adaptive IP Apps capture real-time telemetry from network devices, domain controllers, and service orchestrators, such as Ciena's MCP, to provide network forensic capabilities to provide powerful visualization, analytics, path computation, and traffic engineering capabilities to accelerate the transition toward an Adaptive IP network.

Simpler Network Deployment

Adaptive IP benefits businesses by significantly simplifying network deployment via moving part of the IP control plane function from a router to a centralized SDN layer. This creates the perfect balance between centralized and distributed intelligence increasing performance, scalability, and the capacity to support the new applications and use cases demands.

By enabling a leaner IP protocol stack in the platform, Adaptive IP ensures that the software control, automation, and intelligence layers can address any and all additional service requirements thus allowing for greater simplification at the network layer.

Adaptive IP benefits businesses by significantly simplifying network deployment via moving part of the IP control plane function from a router to a centralized SDN layer. This creates the perfect balance between centralized and distributed intelligence increasing performance, scalability, and the capacity to support the new applications and use cases demands.

Moving into the future

The traditional way of building IP networks is no longer a viable solution to future challenges and opportunities. The legacy IP approach keeps the network closed, is costly to scale and expand, manual-intensive and error-prone, and highly vendor-dependent.

The path from surviving to thriving in today’s market is a holistic network evolution strategy.

Ciena’s Routing and Switching portfolio, with a broad selection of purpose-built hardware platforms supporting marketing-leading WaveLogic 5 coherent optics, streaming telemetry-powered analytics, intelligent data-driven network automation, and a comprehensive suite of professional services is what we call Adaptive IP; a new and better way to build standards-based IP networks, from access to network, that is automated, open, and lean.

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