Enabling agile, open, cloud-based NFV

Rajiv Sodhi, director Telco's & SP's EMEA,
Mirantis

The ground is shifting under telcos and service providers. Many operators have now embraced virtualisation as a tool for increasing operational agility. But first-generation solutions for network application virtualisation — dependent on expensive proprietary hardware, complex and inflexible application stacks and legacy tools — are now slowing operators down, locking them in, and keeping their costs high.

Meanwhile, greenfield competitors (the WhatsApps of the world) are using newer platforms, tools and disciplines to build products that intrude on CSP turf (e.g., by disrupting SMS) and piggyback on CSP-promoted innovations (like 4G on smartphones), says Rajiv Sodhi, director Telco’s & SP’s EMEA, Mirantis.

Telcos can compete and win, however, by embracing fast-moving trends in cloud-based infrastructure virtualisation and agile, software-driven operations. They can use OpenStack IaaS to follow the model proposed by ETSI-NFV — using its open APIs to orchestrate, deploy, host, scale and manage software-based virtual network functions (VNFs) running on VMs or in Linux containers; connecting and chaining them using software-defined virtual networks (SDNs).

By so doing, Telcos and CSPs can drive down cost of doing business, while increasing agility:

  • They can build out their service networks like Google and Amazon do: implementing solutions that make maximum use of robust, low-TCO open source software components and standard compute hardware, mixed seamlessly with best-of-breed name-brand products as needs dictate.
  • They can engineer NFV solutions that scale horizontally, simply and inexpensively, achieving “carrier grade” performance and reliability through redundancy/load-balancing and similar techniques for building ‘self-healing’ clouds.
  • They can revolutionise operations, automating provisioning of new infrastructure, configuring and deploying new services quickly while maintaining stern policy and SLA compliance, scaling services elastically on demand, and creating innovative, secure and robust self-service capabilities for customers.
  • They can develop, test, launch and evolve new services quickly, using modern CI/CD workflows that hide infrastructure complexity while making cutovers and upgrades flawless and deterministically repeatable.

Why OpenStack

Supported, developed and governed by a global community of stakeholders, including thousands of individual developers and teams from hundreds of IT/communications/software technology and service providers, OpenStack offers powerful open APIs, a pluggable controller architecture, and orchestration tools for abstracting, managing and scaling hypervisor and container-based virtual compute, network and storage resources. As such, the framework meets basic requirements for NFVI (Network Functions Virtualisation Infrastructure) — a core component of the full ETSI-NFV specification (described in ETSI-NFV INF 001 – Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); Infrastructure Overview).

Broad support of OpenStack by platform, infrastructure, component and solution providers, and by allied open software and standards-defining organisations means that the framework will adapt quickly to manage the full stack of technologies comprising ETSI-NFV as these evolve, while also offering adopters the potential for great freedom of choice. Down-stack component technologies of immediate interest include:

  • Open standards for SDN and network virtualisation (OpenNFV, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, OpenNaaS), supported and reified in a fast-growing field of (mostly open source) SDN solutions.
  • Specialised network interfaces and communication stacks enabling high-density virtual connectivity while minimising compute overheads (SR-IOV)
  • Support for specialised hardware features like CPU pinning, NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access), and programming frameworks for enabling data-plane acceleration (e.g., Intel DPDK).

… among many others. Up-stack components now coming available include:

  • VNFs designed to perform robustly on virtualised infrastructure, and exploit advanced hardware and stack features for high-density connectivity with low compute overhead. A recent video interview with Martin Taylor, CTO of Metaswitch, describes some of the new engineering techniques required to build and scale very-high-capacity, function-rich cloud-hosted VNFs like Metaswitch’s Perimeta Session Border Controller.
  • Management and Orchestration (MANO) solutions for deploying, scaling, monitoring and managing VNFs.
  • OSS/BSS systems for higher-order operations and business support.

… plus an ever-growing range of sophisticated solutions for application delivery control, network security, operations and software development.RasterMirantisLogo_HiRes_Standard

What CSPs Need

To take advantage of OpenStack for NFV, Telcos and CSPs need partners whose solutions embody the technical leading edge and package it for use without uncertainty: delivering dramatic improvements in time to value, flexibility, scale, speed and cost, along with telco grade reliability; and providing the collaborative support, engineering and training services needed to make everything work and promote operator self-sufficiency.

In October, Mirantis launched an NFV initiative with the aim of helping CSPs save money, move faster, and innovate with fewer roadblocks. Mirantis’ role in this is to provide these companies with:

  • A hardened configuration of Mirantis OpenStack, compliant with the emerging ETSI-NFV reference architecture — one that will swiftly evolve to provide robust support for key advanced infrastructure features required by VNF developers. An example of such a feature is SR-IOV: Single-Root I/O Virtualisation — a method for leveraging a limited number of physical network ports to provide many virtual NICs with minimal overhead. Mirantis recently published the first in a series of NFV-related technical advisories, providing detailed instructions for configuring Mirantis OpenStack with SR-IOV.
  • Simple but sophisticated and highly-customisable tools — OpenStack Fuel plugins, Murano application packages and custom installers — enabling rapid, automated, repeatable deployment of OpenStack in NFV-ready configurations; with integrated post-deployment testing, features for cluster scaling, and minor-version upgrade; along with support for automated configuration and deployment of advanced hardware features, software options, and partner solutions.
  • A fast-growing NFV partner ecosystem, developing OpenStack-compatible platform solutions for VNF hosting and high-capacity networking, plus VNF, SDN, MANO, OSS/BSS and other solutions to fill out the ETSI NFV roadmap, documenting configuration and deployment best practice for carrier-grade performance on the MOS-NFV reference platform, collaborating with Mirantis to create, test and field automated deployment methodologies to speed time-to-value, and committed to providing seamless support.

The first two items are clearly critical, but the last is most important. ETSI’s emerging model for NFV is among the most sophisticated, demanding, and holistic standards ever composed, and its numerous requirements cannot be fulfilled without input from a global community of committed supporters, enabled to combine their technologies and evolve them seamlessly under OpenStack’s big tent.

The author of this blog is Rajiv Sodhi, director Telco’s & SP’s EMEA, Mirantis.

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