Nokia added assurance to its carrier software-defined networking (SDN) platform — or Network Service Platform (NSP).

The SDN technology is designed specifically for carriers. It spans the optical, Ethernet, and IP layers. The platform originated at the former Alcatel-Lucent, which debuted it in May 2015. Nokia inherited it when it closed on its purchase of Alcatel-Lucent in January 2016.

Nokia now counts at least 12 NSP customers, said Tony Kourlas, director of product marketing for the NSM and carrier SDN product portfolios at Nokia. The company is also involved in “well over 70 interactions with customers,” he added. The customers are a mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 telcos as well as a couple of webscale companies.

But as Nokia progressed from NSP lab trials to live deployments, customers began asking for service assurance.

“We have a broad experience in assurance and monitoring,” said Kourlas. “We’re taking that and putting it in the NSP and applying it in a multi-vendor environment."

Essentially, Nokia took its experience with its service aware manager (SAM) used in traditional network environments and added those capabilities to NSP. The company has about 700 customers using its 5620 SAM. “Those apps we’ve taken and extended to multi-vendor SDN,” he said. “We’re evolving assurance into the SDN era.”

Nokia provides its dynamic assurance via KPIs and analytics that can automatically trigger changes at the SDN control layer. Control policies can redirect paths and traffic at any layer – IP, Ethernet, or optical – and across both physical and virtual domains.