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Tata Communications and F5 Deploy Anuta NCX for Network Orchestration
The journey to automation and business transformation is unique for different organizations. In this week’s show, the Packet Pushers chat with two customers of Anuta Networks who are introducing Network Orchestration into their environments and transitioning from device centric to service centric operations.
Tata Communications, a global Tier-1 service provider, deployed NCX to automate its IZO SD-WAN infrastructure. Another customer, F5 Networks deployed NCX in its private cloud for its Silverline DDoS protection and Web application firewall.
Today’s guests are:
• Peter Juffernholz, AVP of Virtualized Network Services at Tata Communications.
•Mike Lechner, Manager, Product Development for Silverline at F5 Networks.
Both Peter and Mike have different business problems to solve, and yet they had similar journey. They embarked upon evaluating model-driven frameworks and came across Anuta’s NCX.
They discussed NCX for following criteria:
Vendor Selection: Both Peter and Mike evaluated multiple solutions including Anuta NCX, Cisco NSO, Gluware and Ansible/Puppet. They selected Anuta NCX for multi-vendor coverage, multi-tenancy, RBAC, an easy-to-use UI, support for greenfield and brownfield environments, policy management, flexibility, scalability and the stability of the platform. They also cited good support from the Anuta team as a factor in their decision.
Multi-Vendor Support: Tata Communications has devices from Cisco, Riverbed, and Versa Networks. F5 Networks has different switching, routing, and security vendors in its data center. They both appreciated NCX’s ability to orchestrate 35 different vendors and 100+ platforms.
Scale: Tata Communications plans to scale to 100,000 CPE devices, and has already on-boarded hundreds of devices. F5 has fewer devices, but has many tenants and services to manage with a small team. They took advantage of NCX’s geographically distributed server-agent architecture.
YANG Modeling: Both Peter and Mike used YANG models extensively. They didn’t want to depend on Anuta’s professional services so they invested in learning the YANG models. Now, they are able to create the service models themselves to control their own destinies.
Organization Alignment: Both Peter and Mike raised this as an important factor in their journey to Network Orchestration. They stressed the importance of a proper mindset in the organization, and had to understand who was going to do what, and how the new system would affect the rest of the operations team. They took an architectural view of their infrastructure and made decisions with a long-term plan.
They learned that a successful deployment depends not only on the technology, but also how well you can make the organizational shift.
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