We used to build data centers with a focus on price per port and raw throughput. If a switch went down, we had redundant paths. If a configuration was fat-fingered, we spent a few hours on a bridge call sweating through our shirts while someone grepped through logs. That was the accepted cost of doing business.
That era is over. The tolerance for downtime has vanished.
Recently we heard from Nokia at Networking Field Day, and the message is clear. The industry is shifting. We are moving away from cost-centric networking to reliability-centric networking. When you are running AI workloads or mission-critical cloud infrastructure, five nines of availability isn’t a marketing tagline. It is the baseline for survival.
Event-Driven Reliability
Nokia is tackling this with their Event-Driven Automation (EDA) paired with Nokia SR Linux. They are leaning heavily on their software heritage. This is the company that builds equipment for air traffic control and power grids. They applied that same obsession with ultra-reliability to the data center. They brought in Bell Labs to do the math and confirm the results.
The research is compelling. They modeled a transition from the legacy Present Mode of Operation to what they call the Future Mode of Operation. The findings, presented by Scott Robohn of Solutional, claim that moving to this automated, intent-based model can result in roughly 24 times less downtime. This means reducing annual downtime from hours to minutes. Not just nines but real quantifiable results.
The core of this improvement is the elimination of the human element. We are the risk. We make typos. We misunderstand dependencies. EDA approaches this with a “human error zero” philosophy. It moves us away from sequential scripting. You don’t write a script that logs in, types a command, waits, and types another. That is fragile.
Instead, EDA uses a declarative model. It is similar to Kubernetes. You define the state you want. You tell the system to build a fabric. You do not tell it how to configure every BGP peer. You can bootstrap a complex topology of eight nodes with fewer than 60 lines of YAML. The system figures out the rest. It normalizes the primitives across vendors, whether you are running Nokia SR Linux, Cisco Nexus, or Arista.
The real shift here is the integration of AIOps. I am usually skeptical of AI in operations because it often feels like a gimmick. But Nokia is building what they call a “Virtual Engineer.” This isn’t a chatbot that summarizes Wikipedia. It is a domain-aware agent. It has access to a digital twin of your network. Before you push a config, the system tests it in the digital twin. It pre-validates the change. If it is going to break the network, it fails in the simulation, not in production.
When things do break, the troubleshooting capabilities are aggressive. There is a “Time Machine” feature. You can rewind the state of the network to thirty minutes before an incident. You can see exactly what the routing table looked like right before the collapse.
The Deep Root Cause Analysis (RCA) tool uses a multi-agent workflow to analyze the root cause. It correlates telemetry, logs, and alarms to find the issue. It avoids the hallucination problem common in generic AI models because it operates within a controlled, evidence-based context. It produces a report telling you exactly what failed and why. It hunts down silent failures like MTU mismatches or ECMP hashing issues that usually take days to diagnose.
This reliability extends to the new wave of AI backend fabrics. We are seeing the rise of the neocloud. These are specialized providers building massive GPU clusters. The networking requirements there are different. You need lossless Ethernet. You need to manage congestion with DCQCN. EDA takes an opinionated approach here. It automates the complexity of rail-only topologies and backend load balancing. It visualizes queue depths and congestion notification in real time. It treats the GPU interconnect with the same rigor as the front-end network. The financial implications are massive. The Bell Labs model suggests that for a mid-sized enterprise, this shift can save tens of millions of dollars annually in penalty costs and lost revenue. Reliability is a financial strategy.
Bringing IT All Together
The days of treating network automation as a series of Python scripts are ending. The complexity of modern data centers, especially those supporting AI workloads, has surpassed human capability to manage manually. Nokia’s EDA platform represents a necessary maturity in the market. It acknowledges that human operators are the primary source of failure and effectively designs us out of the loop for routine tasks.
Nokia isn’t promising a sentient network. They are delivering a system that uses math, simulation, and targeted AI to ensure configurations are correct and troubleshooting is instantaneous. The “Time Machine” functionality and the digital twin pre-validation are features that every network engineer has wanted for twenty years.
Nokia is betting that reliability is the new currency. They are correct. In a world where a four-minute outage can cost millions, the cheapest switch is no longer the one with the lowest sticker price. It is the one that never goes down.
To learn more about Nokia and their AIOps solutions like EDA, make sure to check out the EDA website here. You can also watch the entire Nokia presentation at Networking Field Day on the Nokia presentation page here.
