Having worked for a long on Service Provider arena for most of my career, I have experienced on numerous occasion why customers in service provide segment like to build resilient network and why would they like to have resilient upgrade path.
I started my career implementing service provider networks for TATA Teleservices where I was part of the team who built big optical and data networks and maintained it, watched them grow from small customer base to millions, watched getting those networks commissioned and watched them go live and watched them go down, watched them get choked on new years eve and on important occasions on calendar, watched my colleagues sitting in Operations Maintenance Centre monitoring network and handling various alarms reported from the devices in the field close and 100s of Km apart day and night, watched network engineers worked day and night to keep these networks up and running. When I look back now I feel this was one of the most defining phases of my career which helps me connect easily with customer and more importantly with their networks for I understand what is going through their minds and how does it affect them and how they evaluate and believe in the devices and software that runs on them.
Back in 2006 when I was working for Alcatel-Lucent as a contractor through Aricent, there was an under sea earthquake off Taiwan that disrupted telecommunications network across Asia leading to huge network down time and consequently monetary losses and virtual cut off with the rest of the world and it was realisation during those times that how much are we dependent on these human network lifeline and how they have become integral part of our life. It was during this time that I was working on building transmission protection SNCP, 1+1/1:1/1:N MSP and MS-SPRING/BLSR ring architecture and very soon after that we had delivered transoceanic protocol with extra traffic. It was very exciting to be part of this journey with Alcatel-Lucent to make networks more resilient and contributing in a way to keep the human network lifeline healthy
Another important thing that i learned over the years is how difficult it is for a customer to upgrade their network. There are many factors associated to this. Each release brings along set of features even if you don't need all of them and these features may linked to each other and could potentially introduce regression. In spite of this release going through a strict quality control, each release gets soaked internally at customer location as well before it is decided as worthy for upgrade and upgrade itself goes over a long time as there are usually hundreds or thousands of these devices that customer location that need to go through upgrade and the risk associated with those upgrades is very high as the newer release has to work with old one and the longer the time it takes, higher the risk associated with it. And no device in the network works as standalone, each end to end operation involves at least more than one device as most of the features are network feature. Also these devices are hundreds or kilometres apart with no good reachability and hence there is lot of operational costs that is associated with network upgrades and huge risk that could potentially bring down the network. So there is a tendency that customers don't like to upgrade unless there is a good reason. Each release has typically at least 2-3 yrs of life. But at the same time customer would like to have smaller maintenance units which are critical bug fixes which are discovered after the software is released. So it helps customers to have an option to go for these smaller software maintenance unit to make the existing release more robust and quickly test and adapt to it than waiting for the next release.
Again its not just the service provider segment that are conservative in going for newer releases but even its the same for enterprise customers as well.
Again it was very exciting to be part of Nexus 7.2 history which enabled software maintenance unit functionality which allows customer to take critical bug fixes and when we release those features that help customer build more resilient and more robust networks is always delighting as you know you are contributing to human network lifeline.
I started my career implementing service provider networks for TATA Teleservices where I was part of the team who built big optical and data networks and maintained it, watched them grow from small customer base to millions, watched getting those networks commissioned and watched them go live and watched them go down, watched them get choked on new years eve and on important occasions on calendar, watched my colleagues sitting in Operations Maintenance Centre monitoring network and handling various alarms reported from the devices in the field close and 100s of Km apart day and night, watched network engineers worked day and night to keep these networks up and running. When I look back now I feel this was one of the most defining phases of my career which helps me connect easily with customer and more importantly with their networks for I understand what is going through their minds and how does it affect them and how they evaluate and believe in the devices and software that runs on them.
Back in 2006 when I was working for Alcatel-Lucent as a contractor through Aricent, there was an under sea earthquake off Taiwan that disrupted telecommunications network across Asia leading to huge network down time and consequently monetary losses and virtual cut off with the rest of the world and it was realisation during those times that how much are we dependent on these human network lifeline and how they have become integral part of our life. It was during this time that I was working on building transmission protection SNCP, 1+1/1:1/1:N MSP and MS-SPRING/BLSR ring architecture and very soon after that we had delivered transoceanic protocol with extra traffic. It was very exciting to be part of this journey with Alcatel-Lucent to make networks more resilient and contributing in a way to keep the human network lifeline healthy
Another important thing that i learned over the years is how difficult it is for a customer to upgrade their network. There are many factors associated to this. Each release brings along set of features even if you don't need all of them and these features may linked to each other and could potentially introduce regression. In spite of this release going through a strict quality control, each release gets soaked internally at customer location as well before it is decided as worthy for upgrade and upgrade itself goes over a long time as there are usually hundreds or thousands of these devices that customer location that need to go through upgrade and the risk associated with those upgrades is very high as the newer release has to work with old one and the longer the time it takes, higher the risk associated with it. And no device in the network works as standalone, each end to end operation involves at least more than one device as most of the features are network feature. Also these devices are hundreds or kilometres apart with no good reachability and hence there is lot of operational costs that is associated with network upgrades and huge risk that could potentially bring down the network. So there is a tendency that customers don't like to upgrade unless there is a good reason. Each release has typically at least 2-3 yrs of life. But at the same time customer would like to have smaller maintenance units which are critical bug fixes which are discovered after the software is released. So it helps customers to have an option to go for these smaller software maintenance unit to make the existing release more robust and quickly test and adapt to it than waiting for the next release.
Again its not just the service provider segment that are conservative in going for newer releases but even its the same for enterprise customers as well.
Again it was very exciting to be part of Nexus 7.2 history which enabled software maintenance unit functionality which allows customer to take critical bug fixes and when we release those features that help customer build more resilient and more robust networks is always delighting as you know you are contributing to human network lifeline.
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