Sun OTP is a Carrier Grade platform for NEP application development, deployment and hosting that leverages commercial off-the-shelf components. OTP is also about automating deployments, and also admin procedures and runbooks.
Where does N1SPS come into play then. Well, N1SPS is one of the foundational components inside Sun OTP to be the driver and to orchestrate software deployments, upgrades and rollbacks. It also facilitates the life-cycle-management of the software.
So imagine the following scenario. I am a large Telco and I develop a lot of software. I have a lot of customers but having a hard time controlling the deployments and the software life cycle. The installation requires a lot documentation and the chance of doing something wrong is pretty high. Having someone to read, follow and execture, a 200+ steps installation guide for x number of systems... Well something is bound to go wrong.
So we have then developed and produced some foundational work with N1SPS to facilitate this. The customer can then just click on the piece of software needed, and then N1SPS knows if it is an upgrade or fresh install. It can also split the deployment to keep track on progress and if the deployment needs to be restarted from a specific point in time. The customer only needs to fill out a screen with parameters and then these will be used when the software is deployed. This will get the errors down, like human mistakes but also keep track on all the different steps needed while deploying.
The other benefit is that all this data can then later be harvested so that I, as Large Telco, knows of how things are deployed, when and by who. I can also write collection plans and scripts through N1SPS that can be used to collect information regarding this.
This is just one of the recent areas where N1SPS has been used with great success, and N1SPS is now being used as a building block for large scale NEP solutions.