ONES details automated cost-out and cost-in for SONiC network operations

The blog discusses the use of ONES Orchestration to support cost-out and cost-in operations in networking data centers, emphasizing its role in automating maintenance, workload balancing, and device reintegration to enhance operational efficiency for enterprise network teams.

Research overview

Data centers rely on a network of interconnected devices to route and manage traffic integral to business operations. Efficient management includes planned device maintenance, capacity redistribution, fault handling, load balancing, and scheduled downtime, necessitating controlled traffic draining and reintegration processes.

Technical breakdown

Cost-out involves safely redirecting traffic from a network device to allow service maintenance or upgrades, while cost-in restores the device to active operation post-maintenance. These processes help maintain service continuity by preventing disruptions during device transitions.

ONES Orchestration is presented as a Dockerized platform running on x86 systems, providing APIs that perform soft provisioning, configuration difference generation, and application of device configurations. This API-driven approach facilitates automated and coordinated device management in a multi-vendor network environment.

Product update

ONES offers multi-vendor support compatible with SONiC fabric networks and integrates with established tools such as Ansible, Grafana, and Nornir. It delivers features for network automation, configuration management, and service orchestration, allowing for streamlined Day-2 NetOps operations including cost-out and cost-in workflows.

Operational impact

By automating draining and reintegration processes through its Application Programming Interface (API), ONES Orchestration reduces manual interventions and potential configuration errors. It supports zero-downtime updates with minimal impact on traffic forwarding, enabling efficient handling of maintenance and resource balancing tasks.

Deployment involves selecting SONiC-compatible switches, installing SONiC firmware, and integrating ONES on servers or virtual machines. This combination enhances scalability and flexibility in managing complex network fabrics across diverse vendor equipment.

ONES Orchestration’s delta-based API approach focuses on pushing only necessary configuration changes, thereby minimizing network disruption during updates and preserving service availability throughout operational procedures.

Integration with popular NetOps tools provides centralized visibility and control, facilitating real-time telemetry, performance monitoring, and orchestrated network service delivery across heterogeneous infrastructures.

Leadership perspective

Automating routine operational tasks such as provisioning and maintenance through ONES helps reduce the risk of human error in network management, which is a common source of outages. This automation supports NetOps teams in maintaining consistent service levels while managing evolving infrastructure demands.

ONES Orchestration’s support for multi-vendor and multi-ASIC environments aids organizations in avoiding vendor lock-in, promoting interoperability and operational consistency in diverse networking ecosystems.

Through its programming interfaces and compatibility with existing management tools, ONES aims to streamline workflows and improve the agility of network operations teams involved in ongoing Day-2 management processes.

Entering production involves careful hardware selection, installation steps, and system integration to leverage ONES’s orchestration capabilities for network maintenance, upgrade routines, and workload redistribution tasks.

By focusing on automated, API-driven management of cost-out and cost-in procedures, ONES Orchestration enhances the precision and reliability of network fabric operations critical to enterprise data center performance.

ONES Orchestration provides a shared management platform that supports comprehensive network orchestration and automation, aligning with organizations’ needs to optimize operational overhead and deployment timelines across complex network fabrics.

The platform facilitates multipath routing, load balancing, and fault isolation through automation, which are necessary to ensure network resilience and operational continuity in dynamic data center environments.

Overall, ONES Orchestration integrates automation, multi-vendor compatibility, and API-driven workflows to address the challenges of managing modern, scalable SONiC fabric networks, enabling enterprise IT teams to reduce manual configuration effort and manage infrastructure lifecycle tasks more efficiently.

This Blog Signals brief provides a fact-based summary of the blog outlining ONES Orchestration’s capabilities in streamlining data center network operations through automated cost-out and cost-in functionality, offering relevant information for enterprise network decision-makers and NetOps professionals.