HP and partners accelerate carriers’ transition to Network Functions Virtualization

Yesterdayday at SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, HP announced that leading telecommunications organizations have joined the HP OpenNFV Program as technology partners to help carriers take advantage of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology.

NFV is part of an overall industry shift towards network and application virtualization. The shift to NFV is expected to transform carriers’ networking environments, allowing them to deliver new services to their customers more quickly while significantly reducing both operating and capital expenditures.

The HP OpenNFV Program technology partners include 6Wind, Brocade, GENBAND, Intel, the Israel Mobile & Media Association, Mellanox Technologies, Spirent, SK Telecom, and Wind River. The HP OpenNFV Program is designed to help the telecommunications industry accelerate innovation and launch services faster, more easily and more cost-effectively.

“With more than 20 global NFV proof-of-concept projects in motion, we are well positioned to understand and help guide carriers on their journey to cloud-based delivery models,” said Werner Schaefer, vice president, Network Functions Virtualization, HP. “Our open architectural approach, in collaboration with Intel and our OpenNFV technology partners, is designed to ensure that carriers have a flexible, multivendor platform from which to quickly test and then launch new and innovative services.”

Through the HP OpenNFV Program and OpenNFV Labs, HP provides a robust ecosystem of NFV technology applications and services partners with a broad choice of application-specific environments, as well as a catalog of completed proofs of concept, to quickly develop applications for cloud-enabled NFV deployments. Examples include infrastructure as a service, virtual network platform as a service and core network virtualization.

“Intel and HP share a common vision and commitment to enable a rich ecosystem of SDN/NFV solutions based on open source and open standards,” said Rose Schooler, vice president, Data Center Group, general manager, Communications Storage and Infrastructure Group, Intel Corporation. “HP’s Linux implementation and HP Helion OpenStack are prime examples of innovation optimized on Intel’s Open Network Platform Server Reference Design. We are continuing our collaboration on this effort by joining HP’s OpenNFV Program and Labs as a technology partner.”

The OpenNFV Program provides an open standards–based NFV reference architecture along with HP’s industry-standard products and capabilities. This offers telecommunications carriers a ready-to-deploy architecture that can enable the transformation from legacy networks to an NFV- and software defined network (SDN)-enabled infrastructure.

Participants in the OpenNFV Partner Program receive access to NFV software development kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (APIs) and resources to enable application testing and readiness for carriers, speeding innovation while reducing risk. The program consists of three partner categories:
· Technology partners—Select technology companies and vendors, including network equipment providers (NEPs), original equipment providers (OEMs) and communication service providers (CSPs), that collaborate on technology innovation, integration and support for the HP OpenNFV infrastructure stack based on recommendations from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s (ETSI) NFV Industry Specification Groups (ISG).
· Application partners—Independent software vendors (ISVs) that conduct testing, characterization and validation on the ETSI-compliant HP OpenNFV infrastructure stack.
· Service partners—Systems integrators using the HP OpenNFV infrastructure stack as a platform for their offerings.

OpenNFV Labs—an incubator for NFV innovation
Funded jointly by technology partners and HP, OpenNFV Labs serve as incubators for application partners, offering a shared pool of infrastructure resources, including hardware, software and engineers. Together, HP, partners and carriers collaborate on validation testing of proofs of concept in a safe environment prior to deployment to carrier networks.

New labs built in collaboration with Israel Mobile & Media Association in Tel Aviv, and
SK Telecom in Seoul, South Korea, will open this fall. They join existing OpenNFV Labs in Ft. Collins, Colo., Houston, and Grenoble, France, enabling HP to provide its global customer base with access to an environment necessary to speed the building, testing and validation of NFV proofs of concepts.

“Through joint R&D with HP and the OpenNFV Partner Program, SK Telecom has developed virtualized network architecture which will transform the legacy network and cloud platform for innovative services,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, executive vice president and head of ICT R&D Division, SK Telecom. “The HP OpenNFV program provided all support needed including reference architecture, orchestration and application.”