AWS Deploys Smallworld Network Inventory Solution

As the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continuously invests in optimizing its fiber-optic network capabilities, while maintaining high performance and reliability. AWS is using GE Vernova’s Smallworld Network Inventory, a telecom inventory management solution, to support their fiber-optic network lifecycle management, involving managing both existing infrastructure and future expansions.

Using GEV’s Smallworld Network Inventory, AWS has created a single, global view of its fiber-optic network by aggregating data into one place which now serves as a common foundation for its fiber-optic network service team’s operations.

Using Smallworld Network Inventory’s advanced physical route modelling, AWS engineers can quickly identify any spare capacity within the existing network elements. This enables faster responses to demand and avoiding costly unnecessary deployments, leading to an accelerated fiber-optic network lifecycle time.

Increased business efficiency

Underpinning the fiber-optic network lifecycle, Smallworld Network Inventory provides efficiencies and automation in each step of the design, build, and operate workflows. This helps AWS engineers easily load and manage third party assets, delivered in an array of formats, to create the most efficient network view within a single application.

With Smallworld Network Inventory’s design versions and state model, it is possible to create and reserve routes before the as-built stage. This is crucial in preventing avoidable conflicts and keeping high-quality records in the system. The adoption of digital construction job packs, with their automatic, as-built reconciliation and data quality routines, is the latest of the Smallworld Network Inventory innovations adopted by AWS.

Common global data model for a single global network view

GE Vernova’s Smallworld Physical Network Inventory provides a common data model, covering outside plant and inside plant, managed through catalogue-based objects – thus creating a global, fully connected, and end-to-end view of the networks in a single repository. This helps the AWS team now design with the same single-source global inventory, supporting cross-company collaboration and data-driven decisions.

Simple Cloud-deployed and future-proof architecture

The global scale of AWS’s fiber-optic network means the system is in operational usage 24/7, 365 days a year. From an IT perspective, the Smallworld Network Inventory is fully deployed in secure AWS cloud services embracing advanced cloud native technologies, including full failover and disaster recovery.

Automated deployment CI/CD pipelines are used for the creation and deployment of infrastructure as well as Smallworld Network Inventory suite to highly available and highly secure production and non-production environments. AWS deploys updates within hours and enables them to stay current on latest technology, while automation simplifies IT overhead to manage the solution.

GE Vernova and Telecom

The Smallworld Network Inventory suite provides telecom operators with a network inventory platform to manage the complete end-to-end of their networks, providing a single source of truth to unlock the full operational support systems (OSS) potential and foster innovation. Further automated planning and design features enable operators to roll out new network infrastructure faster and at lower cost by provisioning it through automated APIs, thus speeding up time-to-market. The solution is successfully proven across more than 170 network operators worldwide.