Telefónica used last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to demonstrate end-to-end network-functions virtualization (NFV) instantiation. The worldwide service provider partnered with Brocade, Cyan, Intel, and Red Hat for the demonstration, which used a network virtualization framework based on the ETSI ISG NFV approach.
As implemented in the demo, the framework, developed by the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab, saw a Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter virtual network function (VNF) service chain deployed using standard Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) information models through Cyan's Blue Planet NFV Orchestration engine onto a network virtual function infrastructure. The NFV service orchestrator instantiated and "operationalized" a VNF, both with and without enhanced platform awareness optimization techniques that take advantage of the carrier's Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and Intel's Open Network Platform Server features. Red Hat collaborated with the NFV Reference Lab and Intel on upstream development and testing of what Telefónica described as "many NFV supporting features."
Telefónica asserts the demo illustrated how a multi-vendor implementation of the ETSI ISG NFV architecture with intelligent resource orchestration can deliver carrier-grade performance in instances where a regular cloud infrastructure could not. The service provider cited the following as important elements of the demo:
- Industry-standard, open, and extensible information models such as TOSCA and Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)
Exposure of the performance enablers (NFVI attributes) in the VIM and OVF Descriptors - End-to-end NFV service delivery with NFV intelligence built in at each layer: the VNF, orchestrator, VIM, and NFVI
- The ability to intelligently match the performance requirements of services and VNFs with the available NVFI by optimally placing VNFs on compute resources
- Demonstration of the differences of optimization techniques (NFVI attributes) on the VNF and highlighting of the full use of NFV hardware infrastructure processing capability.
Telefónica has collaborated widely with industry on software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV. Brocade, Cyan, and Red Hat have participated in a number of the NFV efforts (see, for example, "Telefonica, Brocade benchmark NFV deployment and performance" and "NFV architecture target of Telefónica, Cyan, Red Hat partnership").
For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer's Guide.