Altera brings the value of FPGAs to Network Function Virtualization

“FPGAs can be used to ‘super-charge’ virtual machine applications while saving on power, making them an excellent fit for the NFV industry,” said Francis Chow, vice president and general manager of the Communications Business Unit at Altera. “At the same time, FPGAs can reduce capital and operational expenditures, speed service and improve product introduction times for NFV applications, providing a more efficient solution.”

FPGAs act as accelerators by offloading compute workloads, using less power than general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) and central processor units (CPUs) —which helps data centers run cooler. FPGA- and SoC-based solutions are already accelerating servers in the data center in search and convolutional neural networks applications.

“OPNFV is about collaboration from a diverse group of players from across the industry to craft an open platform that we can all use to accelerate NFV” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “We are excited to welcome new silver member, Altera, who is poised to help us implement the goals of open source NFV."

The OPNFV’s Work Benefits Service Providers

Initial interest in working with the OPNFV has come from the network service provider community, including OPNFV founding members AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others. In addition, other industries such as the financial services industry, large enterprises and cloud service providers are showing interest as their needs for NFV.