Service Migration is at the heart of NFV strategy

“OneAccess’ focus on serving the specific needs of operators and CSPs has enabled us to respond to their requirements for a steady and sensible migration path,” explains Pravin Mirchandani, CMO and NFV evangelist, OneAccess. “We help by minimizing the risk of introducing new virtualized services as the migration can run in tandem with their existing OSS and organizational processes.”

OneAccess’ strategy enables operators to introduce NFV gradually, leveraging existing provisioning services where necessary, yet is designed to enable full virtualized automation for even complex service types in an open and operationally practical way. New virtualized network functions (VNFs) can in effect be activated and chained to today’s legacy services. This service migration approach avoids the leap-of-faith pitfall of alternative green field approaches.

“Until now, operators and CSPs have been presented with two basic approaches to NFV migration.” adds Mirchandani. “On the one hand, the big five networking vendors are saying ‘Trust us. We’ll get you there.’ which, in effect, is a fairly transparent invitation to consolidate into inflexible vendor lock-in, something the operators desperately want to avoid. On the other hand, various Layer 2 vendors are advocating a disruptive ‘rip and replace’ strategy, in a bid to introduce an x86 computing platform into their customers’ networks using their equipment. Neither of these approaches takes into account the need to co-exist with existing IT systems or even current upgrade plans to expand or enhance existing enterprise services.”

In the first step of its NFV strategy, OneAccess is announcing the availability of a vCPE Adapter or virtual adapter that enables the full functions of a traditional branch-office CPE to be placed directly in the service chain of an NFV infrastructure. The vCPE Adapter enables all or part of the targeted enterprise network services to be set up using either Netconf, existing legacy protocols or a combination of both.

This means operators can now start their trials and initial NFV service rollouts unconstrained by the need to migrate their legacy services or ‘forklift upgrade’ their existing CPE. Once installed, the vCPE adapter enables all legacy services to be integrated into the service chain and to be provisioned via the adapter or natively with Netconf.

“The networking industry’s delivery of NFV must be aligned with the acute technical and commercial challenges the operators face,” Mirchandani continues. “Based on a 4-step practical process, OneAccess has developed a migration-oriented set of technology solutions which enable the service providers to choose their preferred starting point and adapt their implementation strategy to the needs and constraints of their existing environment, as well as an NFV rollout plan. In this way, service providers retain maximum flexibility and are empowered to introduce new virtualized services in the most efficient manner.

“What OneAccess is presenting today is the promise of significant cost savings to service providers, with minimum pain. In the near future, OneAccess will also deliver both a vCPE and a number of specialized VNFs, with a focus on virtualizing and automating the delivery of more complex dual-headed functions such as VPNs (i.e. encrypted tunnels), WAN optimization and hybrid access link management schemes to augment bandwidth and provide failover and offload for critical business traffic.

“OneAccess has spent the last three years preparing its product portfolio to support this migration strategy. While the larger vendors have vied for influence and set out their big-picture architectures, OneAccess has been doing the technical heavy lifting,” adds Mirchandani. “Our products are now engineered to support a flexible range of integration and migration options and enable the operators to deliver new virtualized and automated network services.