Genome.NFV will progressively evolve Sparkle’s traditional Physical Network Functions (PNF) into dynamic, cloud-native, highly resilient Virtual Network Functions (VNF). The solution has already been deployed at Sparkle’s core data centres in Catania, Italy; Athens, Greece, Miami, Florida (US); as well as Secaucus, New Jersey (USA), with Milan, Italy to follow later this year.
“The relentless process of Hyper Automation of Industries requires service providers to deliver global network services at light speed satisfying extreme reliability requirements,” said Daniele Mancuso, Sparkle’s VP ICT Engineering. “The introduction of Genome sets the path towards the Autonomous Network of the future, confirming Sparkle leadership in technological innovation.”
The first set of VNFs will be available to all new customers of Sparkle’s Global Signalling and LTE Diameter Signalling for international roaming services. Existing customers will be gradually migrated to the new virtualised platforms. The progressive cloudification of voice and mobile network functions will continue throughout 2020 with the introduction of virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and virtual Session Border Controllers (SBC).
Additionally, Genome.SDN is a modular, vendor agnostic, scalable and feature-rich network automation solution for physical and virtual networks. The offering features an automation workflow manager that will assist network engineers to automate complex Method of Procedure (MOP) and Operations repetitive tasks, creating, visualising, and executing automation workflows across the whole Seabone IP/MPLS backbone through a single interface.
This is supported by a planning tool that allows the abstraction and modelling of the IP/MPLS network, supporting engineers to simulate availability and failover scenarios, automating traffic balancing and link optimisation, building forecast needs based on traffic trends, regional growth and other inputs.
Genome.SDN will also extend to all Sparkle network domains, starting with the integration of Nibble Optical Transport Network, planned in early 2020. Nibble is a new ultra-long-haul photonic backbone, which will digitally connect Sicily with the major points of presence (PoPs) and data centres in Europe.
