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Real-World Deployment of a Virtual Cable Hub

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Real-World Deployment of a Virtual Cable Hub Real-World Deployment of a Virtual Cable Hub A Technical Paper prepared for SCTE/ISBE by Asaf Matatyaou Vice President, Solutions and Product Management, Cable Edge Business Harmonic Inc. 4300 North First Street San Jose, CA 95134 408-490-6834 [email protected] © 2017 SCTE-ISBE and NCTA. All rights reserved. Table of Contents Title Page Number 1. Introduction ___________________________________________________________________ 3 2. The Promise of Virtualization ______________________________________________________ 3 3. Today’s Cable Hub _____________________________________________________________ 4 4. Virtualization in All Shapes and Sizes _______________________________________________ 6 5. Virtualization Considerations ______________________________________________________ 7 5.1. Virtualization Criteria in a Virtual Cable Hub ____________________________________ 8 5.2. Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly Approach to a Virtual Cable Hub ___________________________ 8 5.2.1. Hit the ground running _____________________________________________ 9 5.2.2. How fast do you want to fly? ________________________________________ 9 5.2.3. Microservices __________________________________________________ 11 6. The Virtual Cable Hub __________________________________________________________ 12 6.1. Moving Forward While Maintaining Legacy Services ____________________________ 12 6.2. The Cloud for the Virtual Cable Hub _________________________________________ 13 7. Conclusion ___________________________________________________________________ 14 Abbreviations ______________________________________________________________________ 15 Bibliography & References ___________________________________________________________ 16 List of Figures Title Page Number Figure 1 - Today's Cable Hub 4 Figure 2 - Vertical Scaling 11 Figure 3 - Horizontal Scaling 11 Figure 4 - Virtual Cable Hub 12 Figure 5 - Virtual Cable Hub with Legacy Services 13 List of Tables Title Page Number Table 1 - Virtualization Opportunities in a Cable Hub 5 Table 2 - Virtualization Changes in the Cable Hub 6 © 2017 SCTE-ISBE and NCTA. All rights reserved. 2 1. Introduction The promise and potential of virtualizing a cable hub has been discussed over the past few years. While the opportunities are limitless, there must be a starting point and manageable steps for operators in migrating to virtualization. This paper will focus on translating the theory of virtualization into real-world experiences and recommendations based on deployment. Different aspects of a cable hub will be evaluated for virtualization, including using cloud for telemetry and monitoring, configuration and orchestration, operations and back-office elements, as well as a software-based CCAP solution based on a virtual CMTS (vCMTS) implementation. Virtualization implementation approaches will be compared, such as containerization and virtual machines (VM) for different applications and services. In addition to operationalization considerations, support for maintaining legacy services, such as traditional broadcast video, VOD and out-of-band, as well as existing and future IP services will be considered in the transition to a virtual cable hub. 2. The Promise of Virtualization The promise of virtualization is not new. In fact, it’s delivered substantial benefits to many industries, such as data centers, wireless access and Internet of Things (IoT), and has delivered on this promise for decades. The definition of virtualization has broadened over these decades and practical use cases and real-world deployments continue to increase every year. Virtualization promises to enable change at a pace which meets or exceeds customer demand in the most effective manner. Change can be defined in many ways, such as new services, additional security, elastic storage, more efficient infrastructure and in the case of the cable broadband industry it’s all about speed. Virtualization delivers on this promise by separating applications or software from hardware. Key benefits are scalability, sustainability and elastic deployment with the quickness and agility needed to increase business efficiencies and productivity. This separation of software and hardware is the key to quickness and agility of change, as the software can be changed while running on deployed hardware. Upgrading software is not only quicker than replacing hardware, but requires less operational expenditure (OpEx), such as onsite labor and increase in power consumption requirements. With all the benefits mentioned, why is the cable hub lagging behind in embracing virtualization? In the technical paper, Transforming the HFC Access Network with a Software-based CCAP, prepared for SCTE in October, 2015, the considerations for virtualizing the CMTS capabilities in a cable hub were described. Notably, key enablers identified are: 1. CableLabs Remote PHY standard: A standards-based approach separates the physical layer (PHY) from the CMTS Core, which “contains the DOCSIS MAC and the upper layer DOCSIS protocols. This includes all signaling functions, downstream and upstream bandwidth scheduling, and DOCSIS framing.”1 2. Merchant silicon for a full spectrum DOCSIS 3.1 PHY layer: Remote PHY hardware will deliver on a long lifespan, with up to 10 Gbps2 of downstream and up to 2 Gbps of upstream bandwidth. 1 Remote PHY Specification, CM-SP-R-PHY-I07-170524, §5.1, pg. 25 2 MAC and Upper Layer Protocols Interface Specification, CM-SP-MULPIv3.1-I11-1705, §5.1, pg. 51 © 2017 SCTE-ISBE and NCTA. All rights reserved. 3 3. Performance from Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Intel-based x86 servers: The performance delivered by today’s Intel CPUs exceeds minimum product requirements to serve customers’ needs and has the history and potential of continued annual performance gains. These three key enablers are recent technological advances. Coupled with existing virtualization technologies, these key enablers and associated benefits are now ripe for cable edge deployments. 3. Today’s Cable Hub Today’s cable hub is a combination of many legacy and purpose-built hardware-based solutions, which over the past 20 years (DOCSIS turned 20 years in March 20173) has delivered on data, voice and legacy (MPEG-based) video services. To deliver these fundamental services (other services, such as home security and commercial services, are typically running over the DOCSIS data service as the fundamental service), active equipment found in a typical cable hub includes: 1. Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) 2. EdgeQAMs 3. Routers and switches 4. Out-of-band modulators and return path demodulators 5. FCC and LTE leakage signal generation 6. Provisioning servers (such as DHCP and TFTP) 7. Configuration tools 8. Monitoring tools Figure 1 - Today's Cable Hub Most of the equipment listed above can be categorized as either custom hardware (e.g. CMTS & EdgeQAM) or custom software (e.g. configuration and management tools) and most are purpose-built for the cable edge (with the exception of routers, switches and some of the provisioning server components). The challenges in continuing with a customized cable edge and hardware-based approach as compared to 3 DOCSIS 1.0 specifications Version I01 were released March 26, 1997. © 2017 SCTE-ISBE and NCTA. All rights reserved. 4 a virtualization approach, as described in Transforming the HFC Access Network with a Software-based CCAP, are shown in Table 1 - Virtualization Opportunities in a Cable Hub. Table 1 - Virtualization Opportunities in a Cable Hub Hardware-based Challenges Virtualization Opportunities Unsustainable space, power and cooling Dramatically reduced space, power and cooling footprint Proprietary and custom hardware, with long More frequent and shorter development cycles development cycles Complex and infrequent software Agile development with frequent software upgrades upgradeability results in slow feature delivers fast feature velocity introduction Limited capacity, scalability and flexibility Sustainable capacity growth, elastic scalability and increased flexibility Larger failure domain Smaller failure domains High operational expenditure (OpEx) Improved Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), including reduced operational (OpEx) and capital expenditure (CapEx) Today’s cable hub is most challenged by the equipment which doesn’t sustainably scale physically or operationally with service or capacity growth. Sustainable growth will happen when the performance and scale meets or exceeds consumer consumption demands, either driven by actual usage or competition from other access providers, such as Fiber To The Home (FTTH). In other words, virtualizing the cable hub is a high-tech solution for a low-tech problem, specifically, running out of facility space, as well as ever-increasing and recurring electricity expenses. Another consideration for the ever-evolving cable hub is Remote PHY. While this standard technology enables virtualization in many ways, it also demands many more nodes (or service groups) being deployed, with some estimates exceeding a ten-fold increase in nodes. Today’s deployment is manual and labor intensive and doesn’t scale operationally, especially when considering the desired deployment rate of Remote PHY nodes. Today’s cable hub tools include tried-and-true and very familiar tools such as Command Line Interface (CLI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR). In many cases, individual cable operators have customized home-grown tools, interfacing to hardware-based equipment over standard
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