So let's talk about service assurance, what it means, how it's achieved today, and how things will change as NFV comes into the network. So service assurance is the application of policies and processes to ensure that services offered over networks can meet or exceed a predefined service quality level to ensure that user experience remains high. It involves and enables the identification of faults on the network and the repairing of issues in a timely manner, such as to minimize service downtime. And it involves the ability to proactively locate, diagnose, and repair service degradations or malfunctions before-- ideally before users or subscribers are affected at all. Now, providing robust service assurance capabilities is going to be critical. It's going to remain critical as the network transforms to a software-defined and virtualized environment. It's vital to have robust tools that can monitor systems for utilization and can detect faults that could lead to service disruption. Today, monitoring and management activities throughout the network are supported by discrete systems in fixed service chains with tightly integrated hardware and software products and very well-established management frameworks and assurance tools. Now, there are many advantages in cost, speed, and flexibility that come from an environment based on NFV and SDN. However, some of the traditional methods of service assurance may be made more challenging as a result of the separation of the software from the hardware and the ability to deploy services dynamically. So issues like how to choose and direct workload placement, which KPIs you need to monitor all of the time, which ones do you only need to capture when you are troubleshooting an issue? The industry has a lot of work to do to standardize these things. And NFV deployments will almost certainly or rarely be in greenfield environments. i.e. NFV infrastructure will live alongside traditional appliance-based infrastructure for probably for many years to come. And so the investment that service providers have made in their existing service assurance tools will continue, and NFV infrastructure will need to find a way to provide telemetry into those service assurance tools in a flexible and open way. So if we think about service assurance today, one of the ways to think about how it's achieved is through a model that's known in industry as f caps, standing for faults, configuration, accounting, performance, and security. These tools establish baselines, and they use fresh holds to monitor the performance of functions, and to decide if a function is outside of its agreed performance metrics, and if so, what actions are required. So as I've mentioned, as in the highly likely environment scenario where NFV deployments will live alongside legacy physical appliances, it really makes it imperative that the work that Intel does to enable its platform telemetry and the industry does to enable NFV management tools, that they can integrate well into existing tools. [THEME MUSIC]
