Steve Jobs once said, “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
There are three pillars to Intelligent Policy Enforcement: Awareness, Analysis, and Control. Solutions that lack any of these capabilities will limit the ability of an operator to deliver personalized services to their customers. The more they lack, the more limitations that will be imposed on the operator – whether those limits are scalability, performance, granularity, or even operational in nature.
Let’s be upfront about something: Personalized services are HARD.
Think of all the pieces that have to fall into place to deliver a personalized service.
1) A subscriber activates their device, and attempts to access the network. The network authenticates the subscriber and/or device to ensure that they are allowed access to the network.
2) Subscriber “service” must be determined and provisioned to the network. The service “attributes” may include bandwidth allowed, volume of data (either bulk or per service), priorities, security filters, value-added services, or even multi-device correlations. Depending on how the network is configured, this provisioning could be a single transaction to a single system, or many transactions to many systems (policy, charging, access, etc.). The subscriber and their data traffic must be associated with whatever “attributes” that are necessary to deliver their purchased service to their devices.
3) The systems that have been provisioned with the service “attributes” must enforce those attributes without causing instability of the systems or requiring additional CAPEX due to “unexpected” scalability issues.
4) The systems must perform network and business intelligence gathering on all traffic to feed the analytics systems for future service development. The more information that can be collected, the more valuable the data is for the operator. This data has to be collected with as small of an interval as possible, as the longer the interval the more you lose granularity (for example spikes in bandwidth and latency can be smoothed out over long intervals)
5) If volume/event-based charging or CDR/UDR generation is required, every charging event can result in a transaction with the charging infrastructure, and especially at session closing time.
6) In a network where phones go into an “idle” mode or where subscriber movement between locations is tracked, every time this happens can result in more transactions.
And the more services you offer, the harder it gets…
With the announcement of our PL20000 today, we believe that we have delivered the final piece of the puzzle for an ecosystem that will enable the largest network operators in the world to compete on an even keel with smaller, more agile network operators. The limitations faced by large operators are focused on scalability and complexity. Scalability is now a moot point, as the PL20000 can meet the needs of even the most stressful network deployments with the massive performance increase and the port density/support for 100GE interfaces.
The “Simplicity” part is harder (hence the title of the blog). We have been adding capabilities for the last few years to make service creation simpler for operators. Report Studio is a perfect example of this – operators can now ask questions of the network staff and the network team can use Report Studio to answer them based on the massive statistics repository available in the PacketLogic Intelligence Center (which handles an order of magnitude more statistics than other solutions). Our Virtual Services Capability enables operators to define their own services based on application properties (URLs, http referrers, content-type, device-types, file-type, etc.) without intervention by Procera or our signature development team. We have unmatched capability with our PacketLogic Subscriber Management system – in terms of performance (over 100,000 transactions per second), capacity (up to 20,000,000 subscribers in a single system), and ease-of-use (customizable service dictionaries, easy to use interface, interfaces to multiple policy and charging systems simultaneously).
We believe that we are driving solutions towards the nirvana of ‘Radical Simplicity” where carrier-grade IPE solutions do not have to be managed by acolytes of technology that speak arcane languages (ok, maybe program arcane languages). The combination of performance, scalability, and ease-of-use will take Intelligent Policy Enforcement to mass-market deployments for operators of all sizes. Operators that are forced to wait 9 months for a service launch to capitalize on a new trend will find that the trend is no longer hot. Operators that must plan for a performance or scalability reduction for every new service that they launch will very quickly find their solutions very capital intensive and inefficient.
Simplicity is hard. We want to help you move mountains, so we are working smarter (as well as harder!).
) was down. This is how crucial and integrated the Internet is in our lives today, and this is why traffic volumes grow at a pace that outdoes Moore’s law and that saturates pipes.
