Paragon Planner Overview
Network automation has become increasingly important to operators who want to improve their operational and service experience. Network operators can apply automation across the entire network life cycle: from planning and designing, to implementing and operating, and optimizing the network. In addition, by using feedback from the different steps in the lifecycle, operators can achieve closed loop network automation.
The first step in realizing closed loop network automation is the accurate planning and designing of the network. Juniper’s Paragon Automation suite of applications includes Paragon Planner, which helps operators to plan and design their network.
Paragon Planner is a network modeling tool that enables offline visualization of network resources and provides detailed architectural planning of production networks. Network operators can use Paragon Planner to visualize and map services to resources, and forecast the impact of network changes (such as latency, additional traffic, shifts in traffic flows, and new capacity) on transport services. Paragon Planner also enables operators to simulate network changes and other traffic scenarios without affecting the production network, and assess the network for potential failure scenarios.
Key Features and Use Cases
The key features of and use cases for Paragon Planner include the following:
Automatically construct network topologies by using data snapshots of live networks (obtained from Paragon Pathfinder) or source data from stored network configuration files and other sources.
Perform capacity planning to determine whether there is sufficient capacity or if more capacity should be added, and which links can be pruned without compromising resiliency.
Analyze traffic loads to determine accurate link utilization for failure simulation.
Validate network changes (in a safe, virtual environment) before deployment.
Run what-if scenarios to anticipate the impact of any network change.
Create and model VPNs, simulate VPN routing, and generate VPN traffic.
Simulate multicast flows based on user-defined multicast groups and demands.
Design and simulate MPLS traffic engineering (MPLS-TE) and label-switched path (LSP) routing.
Assess network resiliency against different failure scenarios and analyze how traffic is rerouted and its effect on network links.
Ensure service-level agreement (SLA) compliance by modeling class of service (CoS) classes and policies and queuing schemes. (You can define application flows based on CoS to enable the modeling of voice over IP (VoIP) or video on demand (VOD) traffic.)
Model and analyze BGP routing.
Hardware inventory.
Network integrity checks.
Benefits of Paragon Planner
Lower CapEx and OpEx (hardware and maintenance costs) by using Planner's tariff-based design, MPLS LSP, and segment routing traffic engineering (SR-TE) features for effective utilization of the network, and superior design optimization.
Quickly diagnose performance problems by using flow analysis, bottleneck detection and analysis, peak utilization analysis, and multicast simulation features.
Optimize plans for future network growth (to meet business needs) by using capacity planning and data forecasting.
Avoid problems and mitigate risk by assessing the network using Planner’s resiliency analysis, fiber cut analysis, and so on.
Validate new services, equipment, and technologies before they are rolled out.