Implementation Services - Network Automation

The network administrator's workday gets simpler by reducing tedious tasks. This enables IT teams to be proactive rather than being reactive when systems detect problems automatically and react to resolve them. Troubleshooting can be done quickly when automated systems examine systems continuously.

Automation avoids the cycle of “file a ticket, examine, approve, configure, verify.” You need to be careful if the automation systems perform what usually requires change control approval; it will bypass the controls put in place to inform various stakeholders. If the automation system lets you review a suggested change and get change control approval before implementing it, it may be a way to get started slowly until the IT department and end users are comfortable with automated decisions and changes.
Of course, this technique won’t work with real-time changes that some systems provide, such as automatic path selection, which can’t wait for a review cycle that takes human-scale reaction time.

If automation performs tasks quickly, you may be improving your service levels without even knowing it. Time to celebrate! But note that people’s expectations may be improved, so if you ever need to turn off automation, make sure that you’re not held to a higher service level since you may not be able to meet it.

Policy-based networking enables different groups to perform networking design decisions. For example, the combination of corporate security, the apps development team, and the networking team can declare, The web tier talks to the apps server only, and the app tier can talk to the database, and the database does not talk to the web servers.

Automation capabilities such as provisioning are embedded into the network systems’ architecture. Many are considered standard features today, but often started their lives as automation features.
A basic example is DHCP since you don’t allocate static IP addresses for client devices. It's so fundamental that we don’t think of it as automation, but has become so useful we can’t think of deploying client devices without it. A more modern example for infrastructure networking systems is Brocade’s Zero Touch Provisioning for switch image and configuration downloads since it makes configuring switches a lot easier.

Automation assists with day-to-day operations, such as reacting to events and reconfiguring device settings. There are too many items in this category to list here, but whatever takes manual tasks out of the “examine and react” loop qualifies. An example: Software-defined or hybrid-WAN systems that automatically steer traffic between MPLS WANs and Internet links if one goes down. (Examples of this growing area are Cisco iWAN, CloudGenix, Talari, Viptela, VeloCloud, etc).
Network security systems such as intrusion detection and prevention systems also can fall into this category, since they act as automated network sensors with appropriate corrective actions, such as blocking connections.

Integrating an SDN controller with other parts of the infrastructure enables orchestration of virtual machines, networks and storage in a coordinated manner. SDN has many definitions, but at the core level, separation of the data plane from the control plane enables the provisioning and configuration of these elements. Depending on the system capabilities, this may lead to app-driven networks. This means is that it’s possible to load apps that implement networking features into the network controller and those capabilities are rolled out to the network.
Before SDN, IT groups needed to deploy new firmware, or perhaps even new hardware to deploy new features. With SDN, decision-making behavior can be delegated to an app. For example, HP has an SDN App store to program OpenFlow-based networking devices. OpenDaylight, an open source SDN system, accommodates apps that plug into the system, which makes it extensible.

This is also called declarative-intent SDN, which means you describe what you want performed in the network, and the system has the smarts to figure out how to implement it. This is an advanced form of automation since it enables those who are not in the networking team, such as application owners, to define how they want the network to behave. Examples include Cisco’s Application Centric Networking (ACI) and Nuage Networks VSP. In the open source community, some examples are Group-Based Policy (GBP) and Network Intent Composition.

Our network automation services can maximize scalability, maintainability, and reliability of your network resources.

If you still manually configure (and reconfigure) each of your network devices, which is inefficient, error-prone, and difficult to scale. Our network automation principles and tools can make your networks more cost effective, easier to scale, more reliable, and easier to maintain. Our network automation solutions and services will provide your company these key benefits:

• • Minimizing the amount of time a given task requires.
• • Minimizing the opportunity for error in each given task.
• • Enhancing configuration consistency across multiple systems and platforms.
• • Minimizing the turnaround time to configure, manage, and maintain network resources.
• • Providing a more efficient process of documentation.

Our network automation services can be provided to several network devices and platforms such as:

• • Routers.
• • Switches.
• • Load Balancers.
• • Firewalls.

Additionally, Many of day to day network tasks can be achieved by our network automation services such as:

• 1 - Creating, adding, and modifying VLAN and its components on the switches.
• 2- Creating and modifying required access control lists on network devices.
• 3- Creating and modifying an appropriate load balancing pool on the load balancers.
• 4- Creating and modifying NAT items and access control lists on the firewalls.
• 5- Integrating some real-time monitoring systems such as Nagios and MRTG with network, infrastructure for more efficient monitoring and troubleshooting.