IPAM DDI Software, Subscriber Management, CMDB and Per Customer VLANs

Tue May 13 21:37:00 UTC 2014

I would like recommendations on the following software/hardware elements required to run an access network. Assume you are building a greenfield network using a combination of access technologies such as DSL, GPON, AE, and WiFi.

IPAM / DDI Solution: Needs full support for IPv6, Customer VLANs, RFC 1918, VRF, Overlapping Address Space, integration with DNS, DNSSEC, Integration with DHCP, and integration with ARIN. Looks like there are both open source and commercial solutions available according to old NANOG posts. Which cater to service providers? Who are the leaders in this space? Does anyone have experience with dealing with multiple vendors?

Subscriber Management/BRAS/BNG: Redback was the big player back in the day, but I believe they are no longer. Juniper has their Subscriber Management feature pack on their MX routers, and Cisco has their Broadband Network Gateway on their ASR routers. Besides these two vendors I am not sure what other solutions are out there. I believe both of these solutions communicate upstream to external radius servers and DHCP servers. Is anyone using Subscriber Management, or is there another way of doing it?

CMDB: A centralized database to keep track of all assets within the network would be nice. I would assume this would need to tie in with the IPAM solution and billing systems.

I would also like to hear thoughts on the per customer VLAN model. Most of the whitepapers recommend a per customer VLAN for greenfield networks, but that seems like a management and documentation nightmare. The systems described above must be able to manage and maintain per customer VLANs in an automated fashion for this approach to work and scale.

If you had your choice starting from the ground up how would you deploy an access network today?