Phil Harris is vice president and chief technology officer in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office (CTAO) at Cisco Systems. As communications service providers(CSPs) continue to prepare for network functions virtualisation (NFV) deployment, he tells VanillaPlus the benefits are real. However, CSPs must focus on business and operations transformation in addition to technical change, if they are to maximise on the virtualisation opportunities.
What benefits do you see CSPs and their customers achieving?
Phil Harris: Primarily, the ability to rapidly deploy new and highly differentiated services.
As we see the need for differentiation, at the provider level, becoming an even greater driver in the incredibly competitive CSP market and with non-traditional over-the-top and non-incumbent players rapidly entering the market, I think the notion of rapid new technology adoption and new service delivery capabilities are going to be among the key benefits that are derived from network functions virtualisation (NFV) deployment.
It’s simply because the rate at which we can commission, deploy and activate new services becomes a matter of days – if not less, as opposed to weeks and months as it is today.
We will see the proliferation of not just traditional network functions but a new generation of functions and capabilities we can exploit, that quite frankly either aren’t viable in a pure hardware play or because traditional deployment scenarios have become so complex that their value couldn’t be easily realized by CSPs and/or their customers.
I think we’re going to see some other interesting dynamics: As we’ve discussed, NFV promises increased density and richness of capabilities, and with this new types of technology services can be created and innovative business relationships can be contemplated: Companies like Netflix, for example, want to deliver optimised content to their customers, so the ability to provision capabilities closer to the customer becomes an interesting opportunity for traditional infrastructure players to cooperate with over the top players to optimise their respective businesses.
What are the challenges you see at the moment in getting to even a partial NFV environment? We’re seeing lots of proofs of concepts at CSPs but how far away are we from widespread rollout and what steps does the industry need to go through to achieve that?
PH: It comes down to the three Os – organisation, operation and orchestration. When it comes to organisation we see traditional operators that are relatively siloed in infrastructure based business lines such as fixed line or wireless services needing to, in effect, build internal OTT operational groups to address new service deployment and operational opportunities.
To effectively take advantage of NFV, it necessitates an organisational transformation where the underlay and the overlay can work in cooperation as opposed to being ships in the night passing unnoticed.
Some CSPs are ahead of the curve in this, some are not, many are just realising that you cannot put a new technology and a new business model into an existing operational model so easily. Those that do realise this are moving quickly but the types of skillsets required are different.
Orchestration becomes the key here. We have to orchestrate many of the things that used to happen in the factory before the box was delivered to the CSP or things that are usually done relatively statically.
We have to think about not only how we orchestrate the NFV capability, but the NFV environment because, for example, it doesn’t come with a set of RJ45 cable inputs that can simply string virtualised appliances together.
We need to create Day 0 operational state, Day 1 configuration and service chains linking services and applications to customers. We have to build this in real-time and the orchestration requirements are fundamental and advanced beyond the abilities of traditional OSS framework.
How great a challenge is that shift in skillsets for CSPs as they move from a network environment into an IT one?
PH: Every challenge is an opportunity. We have a breed of telecoms or network engineer that has been somewhat layer-specific and within that often hardware specific. We are looking at the IT specialist becoming a more relevant requirement. That’s not to say we don’t have to understand how complex network topologies are built. In fact they become more complex now because they become effectively ad hoc and more variable.
We’ve got to learn on top of what we knew before, as opposed to dispensing with old expertise. What we need is a hybrid engineer who understands the network but at the same time can programme in Python or model in Yang and can deliver a set of capabilities on top of the network infrastructure they were responsible before.
How does Cisco Systems help and what sets you apart from the other providers?
PH: There is some significant consolidation going on in the infrastructure space and some of the heavier weight telecoms infrastructure providers are struggling. For example, the consolidation between optical and IP allows us to have a greater set of control points that we can build into our technology. One thing to remember is we have a very broad portfolio from the enterprise right through to the CSP. This enables us to have a great understanding of where the control points are and how to optimise between the virtualised and remaining physical infra plays.
When we get to high-speed 40G or 100G interfaces for data centres and core aggregation you’re still going to need a set of physical devices that can handle this scale of transport, but we then need a set of very clean and standard interfaces and methods linking this into the virtual space. We have the products, services and expertise to manage this scale and operational challenges because of the scope of our portfolio of solutions.
The key is not about polarising around any one specific technology layer , but about having a range of options.
How complex do you see the service chains being in reality and how will CSPs manage them?
PH: When the winter storms hit and the kids on the east coast of the US go home for a snow day, the first thing they do is watch TV or hit some massively scalable online game; infrastructure loading becomes asymmetric to the normal patterns. How we handle this comes back to orchestration.
We have to recognise the notion of ad hoc infrastructures where we might change the state of an infrastructure based on consumption demand or some other criteria.
Service chains could be deployed over alternate infrastructure to balance load or ensure resiliency in the event of, say power shortages or other service affecting events and the complexity could extend to provide more capacity for a given capability
This potentially constant recalibration of the infrastructure will be driven more from the consumption side than the supply side and the ability to orchestrate in real-time involves modelling a set of intents or objectives that are late binding in terms of how they get deployed.
The other side of this is in the past, our management systems have been fairly monolithic between what we provision and configure and what we assure and what we understand from a performance perspective. I think we need to have more complex assurance systems that allow us to look at criteria outside the infrastructure/technology, to make decisions that could be everything from weather patterns to power availability to economic indicators. That’s going to be the critical difference because of the complexity of the service models and their ad hoc nature.
Is the real business case for NFV the new services and revenue generation rather than the cost saving cases being put forward now?
PH: It’s true to say that much of the initial impetus for application/operating system level virtualisation in the typical data centre was driven by cost optimisation but when I look at CSPs, most of the decisions are being driven by revenue generation opportunities. I think it’s product managers within CSPs that are starting to drive decision making as opposed to network engineering groups in terms of the types of services they need to offer and even the methods by which they are deployed
How important is it that approaches to NFV are standardised?
PH: Standardisation activity is very important and there is a lot of standards body activity going on in the NFV space. We’re heavily embedded in that movement, especially within ETSI and IETF. We’re focused not only on developing standards but also adhering to them. That’s key because we need interoperability across the orchestration components, the NFVs and the supporting virtualised infrastructure and the underlying physical infrastructure. We need a new level of standardisation to achieve that and enable the traditional BSS side of the equation to be integrated into these new environments.
How long do you see the period of migration to NFV taking?
PH: I think there will pockets that will be faster than others. We’ll see some areas where it’s pure NFV and some areas where we start to decouple some of the control and forwarding plane functions through NFV.
One of the things we can start to do is separate the control plane from the forwarding plane for many applications. The forwarding plane is where much of the capex is spent on equipment such as video head end plant or broadband aggregation infrastructure. The control plane, which manages the infrastructure in question, can start to be centralised in network function virtualised appliances. Of course some things will just stay as they are.
In general there will be a simultaneous set of actions across all three of those environments.
The industry itself, as opposed to just the technology, is at an inflection point because we are seeing how the consumer and the service provider have less of a rigid delineation between who provides what to whom.
The finite demarcation point that exists between the provider and the consumer will soon be a thing of the past because individual services and how we realize the relationship between consumer and provider is no longer physical. That transition to a service oriented infrastructure model is now an opportunity that faces us as a huge opportunity. We can now contemplate how we arrange service relationships between consumption and supply in a much more efficient and expansive way.
While we are rightly focused on the technology transitions that need to happen, there are also a set of business transitions that need to occur quickly. Those business transitions are critical to ensuring the maximum benefits of the technology transition are realized and they really need to come first if the new CSP business models of the near future are to be fully realized.
Deployment cycles will vary among CSPs based on the current state of their infrastructure and their business models. We expect widespread NFV deployment to be achieved during the next five to ten years across the globe.
NFV is a reality today and at Cisco we have reorganised our portfolio, our engineering groups, our customer facing organisation and our advanced services teams to help customers rapidly adopt NFV as a key asset in how they evolve their own business and technology areas of focus.
