Amdocs has announced the industry’s first complete, virtualised network control offering. The new virtualised deployment options for Amdocs’ suite of network control products are set to enable service providers to accelerate the introduction of new services while taking full advantage of standard off-the-shelf hardware to reduce costs. The virtualisation solution will be supported on Amdocs network control products widely deployed today, including Amdocs Policy Controller (PCRF), Amdocs Home Subscriber Server, and Amdocs Subscriber Data Broker.
Amdocs’ modular, virtualised environments offer service providers improved elasticity around performance and scalability at a lower cost by breaking the traditional linkage between function and hardware. This virtualised environment – characterised by distributed software architecture, self-contained application clusters with no scale limitations, and no dependency on centralised session/state storage – also enables easy expansion, operation and in-service upgrades.
In addition to these key benefits around performance and scalability, Amdocs’ virtualised network control solutions will enhance service agility, allowing for rapid introduction of services that can be targeted at specific subscribers and/or geographies. Consistent with Amdocs’ approach, these products offer multi-network support and extensive interoperability with network elements, enabling ease of deployment in mixed vendor heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments.
“Control plane applications, such as policy servers, subscriber databases, and IMS, will be among the first virtualised 4G core functions to be implemented in commercial mobile networks,” said Gabriel Brown, senior analyst at Heavy Reading. “By starting with the control plane, operators are able to establish new architectures and networking models that will incorporate more virtualised applications in the future, and in time play a role in broader telecom cloud and software-defined network strategies.”
Rebecca Prudhomme, Amdocs vice president for product and solutions marketing, added: “As part of the first complete virtualised network control plane suites to reach the market, our elastic policy control solution will drive down ongoing costs and enable faster time to market for new service offerings. Following the introduction of Amdocs Elastic Online Charging and certification of our customer experience systems portfolio on VMware as part of our latest CES 9 release. This announcement extends our plans to continue to invest in virtualising our solutions in order to extend these benefits to our customers.”
