GEANT - tools and solutions for federated service management

Presenter: Mark Johnson, GEANT

In Service Support of Multi-domain and Federated Services
GEANT's approach to federated Service Management conforms to two fundamental principles: first,  National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are fully responsible for the R&E institutions within their country whilst GEANT is responsible for connecting the NRENs; second, within the NREN community, GÉANT is best placed to lead the relationship with Europe-wide and inter-continental R&E organizations and projects.  Accordingly, when designing a service for a new multi-national R&E project, GÉANT considers 4 principle actors, namely GEANT itself, the NRENs, the international project ("Project"), and the end-sites involved in (or benefitting from) the project.  The basic interactions between these 4 is that, for in-service support of multi-domain services,  an end-site will only communicate with their NREN provider, and the Project; the Project will only communicate with their end-sites and GEANT; GEANT will only communicate with the Project and the NRENs; and the NRENs will only communicate with GEANT and the end-sites in their country.  

Operational and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS)
In light of the emerging user community requirements and service request volumes, GEANT is evolving its OSS/BSS systems to an architecture that enables agility, process orchestration, user-oriented (as opposed to provider-oriented) service delivery, automation and cross-provider interoperation. The architecture enables resource-facing technology-specific network services (e.g. OTN-based connectivity) to be exposed in the form of user-perceived network services (e.g. high-capacity L1 connectivity with deterministic quality parameters) and be ordered, bundled, modified and decommissioned via dynamic service catalogues. In this architecture, service management functions are a core component of the business layer and interoperate with other business (e.g. CRM) and operations (monitoring or resource provisioning) systems to deliver an one-stop-shop user experience. Introducing a service management platform is therefore a key activity for the evolution of GEANT’s BSS, with several interesting requirements and federation opportunities in the context of federated service management across e-Infrastructures.