Virtualization and Cloud Computing (IaaS) have been around for quite some time now. Many industries have introduced a “Virtualization-first” or even a “Cloud-first” policy for new applications in their datacenters. IT departments and their customers have seen significant benefits over the past five or even ten years.
At the same time, there are areas where hardware-centric deployments are still dominant. But even these industries are seeing major changes. One great example are Telco providers world-wide.
As a result, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has established an Industry Specification Group which is focussing on a very interesting topic called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
Here is what ETSI is saying about NFV:
Telecoms networks contain an increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances. To launch a new network service often requires yet another appliance and finding the space and power to accommodate these boxes is becoming increasingly difficult, in addition to the complexity of integrating and deploying these appliances in a network. Moreover, hardware-based appliances rapidly reach end of life: hardware lifecycles are becoming shorter as innovation accelerates, reducing the return on investment of deploying new services and constraining innovation in an increasingly network-centric world.
Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to address these problems by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. It involves implementing network functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server hardware, and that can be moved to, or instantiated in, various locations in the network as required, without the need to install new equipment.
So it’s all about time to market, agility and cost savings through standardization and reduction of operational complexity. It’s about bringing the benefits of virtualization and Infrastructure-/Platform-as-a-Service to Telco environments. ETSI has also published several NFV Use Cases that can be found in GS NFV 001.
For now, I’d like to share a few links and resources. I’ll post more about this topic in the near future.
– VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger at Mobile World Congress 2014 (Video).
– Blogpost by Ben Fathi (VMware CTO, follow him on Twitter) about NFV – Transforming the Operational Model of the Network.
– VMware’s Principal Engineer Bruce Davie (follow him on Twitter) on NFV and Network Virtualization in 2014.
– VMware’s Solution Exchange that has a special area focussed on Network Functions Virtualization.
– There is a great whitepaper by Lightreading available.