Cloud Back-Office Support Systems (BSS)
The Intercloud provides the following to BSS for several management functions:
Accounting provides data for managing the user accounts and departments.
Contracts and Agreements manages the contracts and support agreements.
Service Offering Catalog selects what offerings are allowed in the catalog.
Pricing sets the price for the service.
Provisioning provisions the services and sets the BSS parameters.
Orchestration supports the dependencies and order of provisioning services.
Subscriptions manages the service subscriptions.
Metering provides usage data.
Entitlements sets user access levels.
Order manages the quote to the order fulfillment process.
Billing creates a single bill and shows the detailed breakdown of the service chargeable components.
Rating allows the cloud provider to discount the service.
Clearing and Settlement provides all billing remediation and settlement services.
For partners and enterprises that already have these components in place, Cisco provides an API for easy consumption of these services.
Intercloud BSS Hardware Requirements
The BSS services require the following components, which are intended to run on standard hardware. Recommended hardware configurations for a minimum production deployment are as follows for cloud controller nodes and compute nodes for compute and the image service, and object, account, container, and proxy servers for object storage.
The Cloud Controller Node (runs network, volume API, scheduler, and image services) requires a 64-bit x86 processor with a minimum of 12 GB RAM and 30 GB disk.
Compute nodes (running virtual instances) require a 64-bit x86 processor, 32 GB RAM, and 30 GB disk.
Intercloud BSS Software Requirements
The BSS software requires infrastructure, integration, and existing business support enhancements. The Intercloud addresses BSS requirements from the infrastructure and integration of services provided by Intercloud Services, Intercloud Partner Services, and the Marketplace application. The API interface is provided for any enhancements required on the existing BSS systems that support the business.