Anyone who has watched Formula 1 will be astounded by the skill and coordination needed for a pitstop. 20 people working in a well-trained team to change all four wheels, adjust the aerodynamics, check components and release the car in less than 3 seconds. Now imagine having to do that while the car is travelling at 200mph around the track! This is the scale of the challenge facing GÉANT as it migrates its IP network to Nokia equipment while still ensuring the network continues to operate and provide the ultra-high performance needed for data-intensive research and education users.
This is why the recent implementation of the first Nokia-to-Nokia trunk connection between London and Amsterdam in July was such a significant achievement. The ability to complete this migration without service interruption bodes well for the ongoing upgrade and replacement project as part of the future-proofing of the GÉANT IP network.
However, behind the scenes, this achievement was even more significant as it serves as a live demonstration of the new GÉANT Automation Platform (GAP).
GAP uses the open-source workflow orchestrator developed by SURF and ESnet, and a range of other open-source tools from both the community and internally developed to provide an end-to-end orchestration, configuration and documentation infrastructure to support these migrations.
Uniquely it also integrates with Ansible to automate the router and interface configurations on the devices. This integration is particularly important as it ensures consistency and accuracy of configurations and removes the need for manually produced and documented configs. This automation will help both as the migration accelerates and also in the future as new updates to the configurations are required – for example for new service implementation or security updates. Having these centrally managed and accessible further improves the reliability, security and flexibility of the network and eases pressure on the engineering teams who previously had to rely on manual processes for much of this mission critical work.
The use of GAP has dramatically reduced the time necessary for the deployment bringing it down to about 30 minutes per link.
“GAP allows GÉANT to effectively make a paradigm shift stopping thinking in terms of lines of configuration and consider the network as functional abstract objects interconnected to deliver services to the R&E users.” – Simone Spinelli, Network Architect, GÉANT
The ability for GAP to work in a multi-vendor network during this migration is of particular importance not only to GÉANT but also many NRENs who have to manage heterogeneous network infrastructures with many hundreds of end-points. Already SURF, ESnet and HEAnet are running the workflow orchestrator in production, and other NRENs are examining it together with all the work done within the GN5-1 project (all available and open source) in the light of managing their own network infrastructures.
“I’m happy we decided to go full-in on the automation platform as the driver of the transition. As we have seen in these first migrations it is changing the way we work, and it will provide us capabilities and control that we did not have before.” – Bram Peeters, Chief Network Operations Officer, GÉANT
This work is the result of around one year of intense collaboration between the Network and the Software departments of GÉANT as well as the wider GÉANT community. The group, called GOAT – GÉANT Orchestration & Automation Team – will continue to deliver updates to GAP so that the entire migration of the network to Nokia will be done in a totally automated manner.
GÉANT would like to extend its thanks to SURF, ESnet and the wider GÉANT community for their help and support in this achievement.
To find out more about the GÉANT network migration visit https://network.geant.org/
To find out more about the GÉANT Automation Platform visit https://wiki.geant.org/display/NNAT/
