Rebrands Telco Cloud Operations with an eye towards new use cases like Container-as-a-Service
VMware announced Thursday the general release of Telco Cloud Service Assurance, a part of the company’s Telco Cloud Platform. The former Telco Cloud Operations is rebranded by VMware to better reflect its evolution, the company said. VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance addresses new use cases including Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) assurance, 4G and 5G mobile core and Radio Access Network (RAN) assurance.
VMware touts Telco Cloud Service Assurance as a way to reduce operational cost and complexity for Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and Service Operations Centers (SOCs).
Everything is managed through “a single pane of glass for Fault Management, Performance Management, Service Management, Root Cause Analysis and Service Impact Analysis in multi-vendor, multi-cloud environments.”
VMware also notes that the solution sports a cloud-native architecture and modern data collector framework with a forward focus on digital network transformation. The solution can gather data from third-party monitoring tools and supports an ETSI-standard Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)-SOL interface to integrate with other standards-based orchestrators.
The platform can discover and link resources on premises and in the cloud to provide topology maps which show both physical and logical connections and relations between infrastructure and software. The results are rendered in real-time to make it easier for operators to visualize the root causes of network failures or issues.
VMware says that Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides end-to-end monitoring of 5G Core and RAN assurance for across all domains. It can also help CSPs exploring Open RAN and virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) architectures to wrangle multi-vendor challenges.
“VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance uses rich sets of data collection techniques to gather fault and performance data from the RAN. Data is gathered from the transport network and physical hardware using built-in collectors. VIM [Virtualized Infrastructure Manager] and CaaS data are obtained from VMware vRealize Operations. A new Kafka collector consumes fault and performance metrics from the RAN element management systems,” said the company.
Other new features in the new release includes third-party data ingestion support including support for data lakes, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployment, RESTful API support for alarms and topology and more.
VMware’s service assurance history
VWware’s service assurance aspirations crystalized back in 2018 when the company – then still a Dell subsidiary — acquired Dell EMC’s service assurance team. The company announced its Smart Assurance solution with Cellwize the following year, further bolstering its portfolio with the acquisition of Uhana that July.
VMware saw a foundational service assurance opportunity to address emerging 5G business models using zero-touch networking and advanced network automation tools aimed at self-configuration, optimization, and even self-healing.
“Now you’re moving to a much more dynamic approach to assurance,” said VMware VP Gabriele Di Piazza at the time. The move to 5G requires a roadmap for services like network slicing, which required that dynamic assurance approach, he noted.
