Chris discusses the challenge of assuring services across combined physical and virtual networks within a single provider and assuring services that are orchestrated across multiple providers. He notes that essentially every major service provider is moving in the direction of implementing NFV in their network in order to have virtualized implementations of what traditionally would have been purpose–built hardware. While a lot of industry attention has focused on creating virtual machines and spinning up virtual network functions (VNFs), up to now not nearly as much energy has gone into assuring virtual network services once they are turned up.

Chris notes that MEF’s work promoting development of East-West LSO APIs is critically important for orchestrating and assuring services among service providers on a global scale. As for CENX itself, the company’s service assurance solution involves taking in real-time data from the network, mapping that against the topology of network domains, and then feeding information back into the orchestration and fulfillment systems to effect network changes within that controlled loop.

Filmed at: MEF 16, Baltimore, USA, 8 November 2016