A Closer Look: Defining OAM
In an earlier post, we touched on Operations, Administrations and Maintenance (OAM) and the holistic approach Xelerated takes to these critical functions. As Carrier Ethernet vendors begin to take OAM more seriously, it’s time to revisit the long-debated topic, taking a closer look at OAM and what it means to the vendor and service provider communities. In a series of three blog posts, I will take a look at the definition of OAM, its importance from the NPU level and why programmability matters.
First, let’s take a quick look at the role OAM plays for service providers and their networks. Service providers demand operational excellence. It is critical to their success. And OAM is a critical component in hitting that mark.
On a high level, OAM is the monitoring and management of network resources – a set of data plane functions which allows the network operator to e.g. identify faults before they escalate and get noticed by end users, or to set a remote node into loopback for configuration under a service window. For a good background on Carrier Ethernet OAM, I recommend a white paper by RAD.
OAM measures the status of nodes and links of the network, and it notifies control and management planes in case of events. Closely related to OAM is the area of performance monitoring, where the data plane provides information of the performance (in terms of throughput, packet loss, delay and delay-variations) of links and services across networks and service provider domains. Ethernet network and service level OAM tasks are well defined in the IEEE 802.1ag while performance monitoring is described in the ITU Y.1731.
The increased demand for performance monitoring is driven by the interest for enterprises and content providers to monitor their networks. Services providers therefore have to offer a secure and reliable interface to the virtual private network connections these services are based on.
Automated OAM functions enable service providers to streamline their operation and reduce truck-rolls. They have invested decades and several million dollars of IT investments on operational network and service systems. Therefore, they are putting careful attention to the OAM capabilities of network nodes. The switches and routers have to comply to current ways to monitor and provide services, as well as provide the required features and performance planned in future network designs.
By providing hard requirements on OAM, service providers can continue to run their operations with small and highly experienced staff. It is way too expensive to leave this set of requirements out in the purchasing of next generation Carrier Ethernet products. With advanced OAM, the business can run more efficiently. But for some reason, many Carrier Ethernet vendors are still behind in delivering what carriers really require for OAM and performance monitoring. It may have to do with the stress these functions put on the hardware. Next week’s blog post will focus on this. I will look into OAM from the network processing perspective.
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