#anutanetworks

As networks grow in complexity, the demand for automation is ever increasing. Every network architect is looking for ways to eliminate tedious, error-prone manual operations and embrace automation to free time for more value-added activity. From onboarding multi-vendor,  multi-domain devices to monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediating network issues – automation has the capability to revolutionize networking.

When do you require network automation?

Are you excited about an entirely self-driven autonomous smart car?  Probably not. However, you probably appreciate automatic transmission as well as cruise control and other features that facilitate easy driving.  Much like smart cars, the journey towards network automation will be gradual. Are network architects and network administrators ready for a  self-driving network? Possibly, but most architects want some level of control in steering network operations and are unwilling to take the back seat. However, solutions that can automate mundane tasks are overwhelmingly welcomed. In a network world of multi-vendor infrastructure and devices, on-boarding, maintaining configuration, and detecting and remediating compliance violations becomes a daunting task. It is nearly impossible to monitor and troubleshoot a vast network manually or draw any insights given the lack of scalability. Automation tools have been trying to solve this challenge and have been successful in providing some value to the administrators. Tools such as Ansible help you push configuration changes to devices automatically. Netbox,  Github, and others help track configuration drifts, and Python is used to add intelligence into the automation framework. Collected network data can also be stored in open source time-series databases like  Prometheus and Influx, which when integrated with Grafana help provide visibility and insights into the network. While you can get started quickly with these tools and achieve some level of automation, what is required in the long run is a more robust and comprehensive automation solution.

What constitutes a comprehensive network automation solution?

Network administrators and architects have been test-driving various in-house,  open-sourced and commercial automation solutions for quite some time.  While some solutions are low code and easy to deploy, many lack the capacity and scalability for long term needs. On the other end of the spectrum, there are robust offerings equipped with shock absorbing and disaster recovery features, but they require a large footprint and have limited compatibility with only a small subset of vendors. A comprehensive network automation solution automates the complete end-to-end device and service lifecycle. Moreover, it can scale to support a large number of vendors as well as provision devices, collect specific network information, and provide analytics distinct to particular use cases. An easily scalable solution with a small footprint, allows network operators to start small and grow with automation confidence. Constant monitoring of all devices anticipates possible configuration, compliance or other network issues and automatically remediates issues with known solutions. The solution also integrates with ServiceNow, Jira, and other ticketing and billing systems to provide you a complete end to end closed-loop automation platform.

Look before you leap

The first instinct towards automating your network is the confidence that it can be done in-house with standard tools or custom scripting. Some common pitfalls include: Let’s try it ourselves. There is a ton of free automation tools. Many companies have done it internally. We have already automated a part of our network so why should we waste money by buying a packaged solution? While a homegrown automation solution might appear plausible initially, it may be wiser to ask the following questions:

How many automation tools can we learn and handle?  Each tool is specialized in its area – such as Ansible for configuration, Netbox for IPAM, Prometheus for database, and Python for intelligence. Comprehending and maintaining every tool can become cumbersome.

How much integration support do we get?  For a complete closed loop automation integration with ticketing/billing/OSS/BSS are the fundamental underlying requirements.  If the tools do not comprehend these capabilities, is the support readily available or will it have to be built?

How do I develop automation scripts? Developing an automation framework itself becomes a project on its own.  Significant resources will have to be allocated in order to plan for software versioning, maintenance, and upgrades of automation scripts.

How do we handle scripting issues? You have to worry not only about your network but also your script bugs that can adversely impact your automation system. You will have to learn low-level OS integrations to optimally scale scripts.

How many resources can I dedicate towards automation? A project of significant size and scope requires dedicated resources to create and maintain various automation scripts.

How much risk am I willing to take? A  project of this scale may take years to complete. Even then, it may not meet intent or expectations of the lines of businesses that are supported. Are you willing to risk failure?

Will my network get locked to a single vendor?  It’s easy to automate when there is uniformity. If all scripts are tailored towards a particular single vendor, it could become exceedingly difficult to move to other vendors that might bring a best of breed approach for a particular workflow or set of applications.

What happens if key team members leave? This is perhaps one of the most challenging questions to answer. If your key team members that designed and developed the automation system leave  the organization, how could it impact ongoing network operations?

When should you consider deploying a packaged automation solution?

Smaller networks might lend themselves to an internally developed automation solution, but maintenance and future scalability are still risk points.  On the other hand, larger, more extensive multi-vendor and multi-domain networks will benefit greatly from a packaged, microservices based automation solution. The following checklist might provide insight into determining the fit of a packaged solution:

Is there a need to automate more than 500 devices on a given network?

Are there more than 2 vendors in a given network?

Do network operations need to be tied to business operations? I.e. integration of network workflows with ServiceNow/Jira, etc.

Is a single pane of glass desired to manage a given network, or can it be managed with multiple, distributed interfaces?

Is efficient provisioning required to effectively scale an automation framework as a network grows?

Is network enhancement and future proofing a long term objective?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, consider Anuta Networks ATOM for your network automation needs. Wantto learn more? Visit

www.anutanetworks.com

Enterprises and Service Providers plan to be multicloud ready to  minimize business risk. Hence, the automation solution must be able to  support multicloud network management.

Multicloud Ready

The Anuta ATOM platform is composed of many microservices  or docker containers that provide functionality such as discovering the  devices, building the topology, collecting the telemetry data, creating  a service chain across multiple vendor devices as well as delivering  analytics and visualization of the network infrastructure. Anuta ATOM  uses kubernettes to manage the various docker containers, so these can  be deployed on-prem, or these can be deployed in public clouds such as  AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Multicloud Migration

As Enterprises shift from on-prem deployments to multicloud, Anuta  ATOM eases the migration by building secure VPN tunnels on-demand.

Multicloud Management

From the single ATOM GUI, operators can manage the on-prem as well as  multicloud networks including IPAM, Security Policy, Standard  templates, and complex workflows that span hybrid networks.

Multicloud VNF Lifecycle

In addition, Anuta ATOM offers lifecycle management for various  virtual appliances (VNFs) whether they are hosted in hypervisors or  deployed as docker containers in the hybrid cloud networks.

Anuta ATOM Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Automation solution provides a centralized management plane and orchestrator for SD-WAN and existing branch infrastructure. ATOM provides assurance, analytics, and orchestration to multi-vendor SD-WANcontrollers, physical and virtual branch CPEs, next-generation firewalls, and WAN optimization devices. It reduces human errors and delivers consistent policies across the WAN infrastructure. ATOM’s powerful analytics and closed-loop automation help in creating self-healing and smart networks.

In Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), on-demand delivery of network services is accelerated by avoiding long hardware deployment cycles. SDDCs simplify vendor replacement and support dynamic data loads by scaling out virtual appliances.

In a software defined world, you can quickly identify capacity bottlenecks and migrate tenant services.

In a software defined world, you (the IT admin) can quickly identify capacity bottlenecks and migrate tenant services for effective resource utilization. However, there are quite a few challenges on the path to realizing the true potential of Software Defined Data Centers. 

On-Demand Orchestration on Existing Networks: The idea of a Software Defined Network sounds good on paper; but, how can you make an existing network flexible? You need to provision resources on-demand, expand and contract the network as demand changes, and undo changes to resources that were made during provisioning. 

Multi-Vendor Environment:  For technical and business reasons, you are using a diverse set of appliances from vendors like Cisco, Juniper, F5, Citrix, Brocade, VMware, Riverbed, etc., each with different versions and different APIs. Hardware independence reduces differentiation and encourages more vendors to offer the same network services, complicating the problem further. 

Virtual Appliance Management: Network services that were originally limited to one or few physical appliances, will now be spread across hundreds of virtual appliances, leading to sprawl. You have to manage the virtual appliances programmatically through a policy-driven framework.  For that to happen, a few difficult questions have to be answered. How do you build all the templates for virtual appliances? How do you associate the templates with a business policy? How do you manage the licenses and Images?

Most importantly, who is going to manage the virtual appliance VM? Is it the server admin, the network admin or the cloud admin?

Virtual Appliance Placement:  In the physical appliance based architecture, network services are placed to honor traffic patterns such as east-west or north-south. You will have to honor many of these design considerations in the virtual appliance based infrastructure as well. Are you going to co-locate the virtual appliance VM with tenant VMs or do you want to allocate dedicated compute resources to the virtual appliance VMs?

Virtual Appliance Monitoring: You currently use many tools such as CLI, console access and traditional network management tools to troubleshoot network issues. In a multi-tenant data center that is prone to virtual appliance sprawl, you require a sophisticated solution that maps tenant services to network resources to help pinpoint the root cause of service failures.

Hybrid Architectures: Despite the advantages of virtual appliances, some network services will still be delivered using physical appliances. An orchestration solution needs to support deployments consisting of both physical and virtual network appliances.

Solution – Anuta Networks ATOM :With the latest release, Anuta Networks ATOM delivers the industry’s first on-demand network service orchestration for leading L2-L7 virtual service appliances from multiple vendors such as the Cisco VSG, Cisco ASA 1000v, Cisco CSR 1000v, Cisco Nexus 1000v, VMware DVS, Citrix NetScaler VPX, F5 BIG-IP and Riverbed Stingray ADC. Anuta ATOM offers virtual appliance life cycle management including appliance instantiation, placement, image management, service definitions, provisioning, commissioning and decommissioning.

Formulating a well-defined network compliance policy, automated validations and enforcement mechanisms is essential in ensuring network consistency and business continuity. At the end of the day, automated compliance functions as a safety check when humans fail to execute their tasks.

We have keenly listened to our customers, and we have heard the need for a network compliance solution that enables monitoring and management of the entire network from a single instance. That’s why the Anuta ATOM platform delivers advanced compliance management capabilities, making it an all-encompassing solution for any compliance needs.

With rich multi-vendor support and a horizontally scalable platform, Anuta ATOM can automate your entire network and provides centralized compliance management.

ATOM Network Compliance

Save Time, Eliminate Frustration and Define Complicated Policies with Ease

Defining a policy is like painting – better the quality of brush, finer the emphasis on details.

Your network compliance policies include several configurations for security, device/application onboarding, DNS, IP Mapping among others. The small set of compliance policies that you started with, has grown into a long confusing and indecipherable list. Anuta ATOM Policy Builder is designed to provide you an easy and intuitive interface to define complex policies with ease. Use the traditional string templates or advanced python-jinja based templates to define parameterized baseline or expected configurations as well as the action taken with a given policy violation.

Improve Network Efficiency and Mitigate Security Threats with In-Depth Analytics

Anuta ATOM’s compliance dashboard presents you with all of the essential information needed to make critical business decisions. You can view a summary of compliant, non-compliant and reconciled devices and services as well as observe past trends and validate network behavior. ATOM also monitors and displays detailed information across your multi-vendor and multi-domain networks and helps provide actionable in-depth insights.

CLI compliance summary

Remain Compliant Around-the-Clock

Compliance is not a one-time occurrence. Even a small lapse has the potential to severely undermine your network and business reputation. You must audit the network regularly and remediate any non-compliant service or devices quickly. Non-compliance to password policy, as a common example, can lead to a massive security breach with dire consequences. Therefore, it is critical to identify and fix such non-compliance issues promptly. ATOM can schedule and run a network audit at a time and frequency of your choosing and helps you to identify such problems quickly. You can also manually trigger a network audit.

Innovate and Focus on your Network, not CLI

Anuta ATOM handles all of the low-level tedious tasks such as device configuration and enables you to focus your time and energy on more critical activities focused on network management and security. With extensive device support covering 45+ vendors, a variety of communication support – CLI, API, Yang or Netconf, and comprehensive hybrid multi-cloud support, ATOM empowers you to drive real value back into the core lines of business in the form of agility and responsiveness.

Live Stress-Free with Automated Remediation

Get rid of incessant alarms, urgent fixes and sleepless nights. Anuta ATOM’s auto-remediation feature enables you to define remediation action to be taken on a rule violation. The ATOM correlation engine also monitors and validates all rules continuously. Upon discovery of any violations, ATOM notifies and alerts administrators through email, slack notifications, dashboard alerts or any other pre-defined means. ATOM can also preview the suggested fixes so the administrator can approve changes quickly and easily as well as automatically schedule jobs to remediate the offending service or device.

Document Everything Specific to Your Business

CLI compliance Report

Reliable documentation is a must. Documentation and reports help track all aspects of compliance management – compliant and non-compliant devices/services across vendors and platforms, policies validated, remediation actions taken, and much more. Every business has unique documentation needs and it is mission critical that reports are generated specifically to business need. The Anuta ATOM platform facilitates the creation and generation of custom reports specific to your network and business. This enables you to focus on KPIs of your interest. ATOM also enables troubleshooting and forensic analytics by tracking compliance history.

ATOM constantly monitors your network, runs compliance checks for thousands of devices across multiple vendors, and remediates any violation – keeping your network compliant while ensuring the highest user satisfaction and, eliminating potential business losses and/or legal actions.

Anuta ATOM Platform delivers compliance, ensures consistency and secures your multivendor and multidomain network

Worldwide network operation teams are facing intense demands from both internal constituents and application owners for a flexible, secure and predictable infrastructure. Further complicating matters, operators are burdened with legacy infrastructure, broken processes, limited visibility and shrinking budgets.

Anuta ATOM uniquely addresses these pain points and delivers a modular, extensible, scalable and cloud-native software platform that enables enterprises and service providers to rapidly design and provision network services, collect real-time network telemetry, develop deep network analytics, ensure compliance and provide service assurance for multi-vendor physical and virtual infrastructure.

With ATOM, networking teams can deliver services faster, eliminate human errors, avoid security violations, reduce OpEx and meet SLAs with exceptional high availability.

Multi-Vendor Support

Anuta ATOM supports 150+ platforms from 40+ vendors. Anuta ATOM orchestrates brownfield and greenfield deployments of Physical, Virtual, SDN and NFV infrastructure across multiple network domains.

Closed-Loop Assurance

Anuta ATOM collects streaming network telemetry from multi-vendor infrastructure using Google Protobufs. It applies machine learning algorithms to develop deep analytics and reports. The solution simplifies troubleshooting by providing the context of the entire network. Customers can define KPI metrics and corrective actions to automate SLA compliance.

Microservices Architecture

Anuta ATOM is composed of many microservices that can be scaled-up or scaled-down in public and private clouds. The Microservices architecture reduces overall system footprint and enables migration in a multi-cloud world. Anuta ATOM’s flexible architecture scales horizontally to support 1 million+ devices.

Extensible Platform

Anuta ATOM uses extensible data models and follows open standards such as IETF YANG and OpenConfig models. The entire platform functionality is available via the REST API for integration with OSS/BSS and ticketing systems. Anuta ATOM has an SDK that simplifies overall development effort, introduces version control to treat the infrastructure as code and supports ongoing DevOps movement.

Network Assurance, Network Telemetry and Network Orchestration

Cloud Ready

Anuta ATOM is containerized and can be deployed in public clouds including AWS, Azure and GCP. ATOM can manage Small, Medium or Very large-scale networks in private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

Anuta ATOM Advantages

One of the broadest industry coverage.

Investment protection for the future demands of IoT, 5G, Multi-Cloud

Aligned with open standards

Horizontally scalable to automate 1 Million+ devices.

Ensures a higher and more consistent QoS.

Flexible to run on any cloud including AWS, Azure, GCP.

High Resiliency and Auto-Scale

A powerful interface to define KPIs and corrective actions.

Collaboration infrastructure for Device, Service Model and Custom App. development 

A leading financial services provider that delivers real-time information to global banks needed to introduce network analytics and closed-loop automation that delivers capacity management, performance and latency optimization, predictive analytics, network assurance, and SLA compliance.

Anuta Networks Overview

Anuta networks, we’re based in San Francisco Bay Area with customers and partners worldwide. Some of our leading customers as you can see here, very large Telcos and enterprise customers all over the world. And what we offer is called closed-loop automation that delivers orchestration, analytics, and telemetry for multi-vendor networks. We support 45 different vendors, and we orchestrate and automate networks across multiple domains whether it’s your data center, Campus, branch, the MPLS core network, and the SD-WAN as well.

Customer Profile & Requirements

So the case Sturdy today is about a financial services customer. They deliver financial news – stock data, as well as disclosure data to their customers and their main challenges, is about delivering this financial data within milliseconds to their customers. And their network engineers said “our network is a slave of the applications. Whatever the application wants, the network has to respond within milliseconds.” So they want to implement real-time network analytics, and they want to make the network very responsive to the application demands, and they want to do this within 500 milliseconds. So we’ll go into details as to how the Anuta’s ATOM is helping him deliver this demand from the applications.

Customer Requirements

So – a little bit more in detail; the requirements. The solution, the automation should be able to collect the data whether its streaming telemetry or traditional SNMP based data. And this all has to be analyzed and has to create reports and notifications within milliseconds. And this has to scale to thousands of devices and millions of interfaces and this has to be stored for more than a year for compliance purposes. And they want to make sure the platform is fully redundant, and there is no single point of failure. And this has to support open standards.

Analytics and Closed-Loop Automation: Interface Flapping

So the solution we offer as I said is closed loop automation. It’s best to explain using an example, let’s say you can define the baseline behavior for any network. Let’s say you’re looking at the interfaces – you can say I don’t expect this interface to flap more than two times in a day. Now you can define what you mean by that metric and how you want to collect it and how frequently you want us to monitor it.

And then the correlation engine is comparing the current behavior with the baseline behavior and based on the various deviations that are happening; it can automate the corrective actions. So for example, if the interfaces are flapping once or twice in an hour, you can open it as a ticket in a Service Now system. But if it’s like excessive flapping, then you can immediately shut down that interface. So we can introduce automatic remediation that works across multiple vendors using a workflow engine, and we can also integrate with tools like Grafana so we can visualize all the metrics and generate reports and compliance reports as well.

Anuta ATOM Architecture

This is a bit of detailed slide. It tries to explain how we achieved this. The ATOM platform is composed of many microservices. All of these are Docker containers. They provide individual functionality like discovering the devices, building the topology, collecting the telemetry data, creating a service chain across multiple vendor devices as well as delivering analytics and visualization of the network infrastructure. We integrate with 45 different vendors – all the leading vendors: Cisco, Arista, F5, Citrix, Juniper – you name it. We have it. All the networking related devices we can configure either using CLI, NETCONF, API or REST as well. And all of this data is stored in a time series database with which you can query their data and generate all kinds of reports. And we use kubernettes to manage the various Docker containers within the ATOM platform, so these can be deployed on-prem, or these can be deployed in public clouds like AWS and Azure as well.

Deployment Architecture

So here is the customer deployment – as you can see it’s a fully redundant design. They have multiple data centers – The two instances of the ATOM are synchronizing with each other. The policy data, as well as the times series data, is constantly synchronized so that you have a fully redundant design. And we will go through a short demo of how this whole integration looks like.

Device Onboarding and Topology

So let me switch to the demo. This is a recorded demo so I’ll try to pause it so you can follow along. So first we are going to show a dashboard of all the devices. We then discovered the devices; we can see the various devices, and the config and the ATOM is sucking up all the configuration data from all these vendors, and it normalizes it into a JSON object. So now it builds a topology of your network – it creates this concept of resource pools, and you can look into details of each of their devices. As you can see it overlays operational data on top of this topology. So that gives you full visibility into your entire geographical distribution.

Configure Pre-defined Telemetry Sensors

And then we are configuring telemetry data, the sensors – on this case we are configuring the interface statistics metric on the Cisco IOS-XR. You can decide exactly which data you want from this particular IOS. We are looking for interface status stats, and we can push this config across hundreds of devices. Now from a single GUI, you are configuring the Arista, the Cisco, the Juniper and ATOM will go through a workflow engine. It’s going to show you now the model that it is going to push to the device. As an operator, you can look at the model and verify that everything is working correctly and you can approve it and schedule to push this config at any particular time.

So once it is approved the ATOM is going to auto-generate the commands for various devices whether it’s the Cisco or Arista or Juniper as you can see it’s going to show you the Cisco CLI that it is going to push to the devices. Now the devices start sending that telemetry data to the ATOM platform. And you can see the data in the Grafana dashboard. So here we collect various metrics like interface Utilization and CPU utilization, interface drops and things like that – the dashboard is highly customizable, you can build your own reports and have different alerts created out of it.

Latency Results

And because this customer is so particular about the latency, we have collected the latency within the ATOM platform. You can see that in 26 milliseconds we are able to take the network state like something happens on the network and that data will be stored in the database for applications to access within 25 milliseconds. That’s the kind of latency we are dealing with. The ATOM platform optimizes the overall end to end latency by using the latest software stack, and it works across multiple domains. So it’s a really short demo.

Anuta ATOM Delivers

The main takeaway is that the ATOM platform is able to meet the latency requirements and help the customer deliver very fast and responsive networks that are working across multiple vendors and that has a very fully redundant design using open standards.

Why Anuta ATOM?

So here is the final slide – as you can see, the ATOM scales to millions of devices using micro services-based architecture. It introduces closed-loop automation that delivers analytics, remediation, monitoring as well as orchestration for multi-vendor infrastructure. And it also can be deployed on-prem or in the public cloud like AWS and Azure.

Additional Resources