Service providers worldwide are tapping into a booming community of open sourced software to better compete with both their existing competitors and dominant forces of the OTT world.
There is an ongoing surge in initiatives that make NFV solutions available in an open manner for use by various parties, enabling service providers to enjoy the benefits of accessing software from across a global community of system integrators, says, Sanjay Bhatia, vice-president Solutions Marketing at GENBAND. The likes of HP’s OpenNFV, OPNFV, OpenFlow, Open vSwitch and ONOS are all aimed at providing large eco-systems that allow open source access to software across various parts of the architecture, from virtualisation and infrastructure management through to orchestration.
As modern technologies become increasingly complex it becomes more and more the case that no single vendor has all the answers. Thus we have seen the emergence of partner ecosystems that are designed to provide comprehensive and complete NFV solutions to service providers.
These ecosystems are helping service providers achieve goals that infrastructure platforms based on enterprise-class software cannot, and enabling the industry to come together to eliminate critical issues such as network downtime, which causes prohibits businesses through operational costs, SLA penalties and customer churn.
This innovative new approach to software procurement encourages software development and integration, and presents service providers with an opportunity to reduce both their capital and operational investment and reduce the time it takes to bring services to market.
The key value of this approach for the wider industry is having a global community providing software for open deployment. Businesses can now avoid the costly setbacks of vendor lock-in and evade the huge problem of seeing their systems fall foul to end-of-life software – which is not only affects business productivity but also leaves corporate systems hugely vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
This access to a global stock of the latest and greatest software enables businesses to run as efficiently as possible, while also allowing them to bring out the best of their employees. Highly skilled workers now have the freedom to put those skills to best use by utilising cutting-edge technology, rather than finding themselves restricted by legacy technologies.
The obvious concern over such an open approach to technology is the security and privacy risk.
As an example of how this works in practice, the HP OpenNFV provides service providers with pre-integrated kits that are designed to provide a variety of solutions to help them host network functions in an NFV environment. This includes an NFV Storage Kit, which simplifies integration with existing environments, reduces the time it takes to roll-out new services and minimises OPEX spend; an NFV Starter Kit, which helps service providers quickly and seamlessly develop NFV clouds; an NFV Compute Kit which, when added to the starter kit, provides flexible scaling by augmenting the workload process capacity; and an NFV Control Kit, which is designed for service providers running custom, limited trials reusing existing infrastructure elements with minimal CAPEX spend.
Despite the many positives, this open source approach to NFV is still in relative infancy. There is still some way to go and several creases to iron out, with the overarching problem of this blueprint being who provides the software support and who carries responsibility for maintaining and providing a whole ream of new releases. But the carrier grade requirements for NFV clouds carry an encrypted AAA database – Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting – teamed up with network-level authentication and data protection via encryption – ensuring the highest possible level of security for service providers.
The open source approach to NFV is seeing businesses around the world flourish as they enjoy access to the latest software and get the best out of their employees. The positives are seemingly limitless and, as the initiatives continue to grow and evolve, we’ll see this approach become a no-brainer decision for businesses of all size.
The onus is now on the industry and vendors to help service providers to re-architect the way they apply new services much faster than they can currently do so. To ensure this movement is a success they must fundamentally rethink both their architectural approach and their business model in general.
The author of this blog is Sanjay Bhatia, vice-president Solutions Marketing at GENBAND, an HP OpenNFV Technology partner.
About the author:
Sanjay Bhatia is serving as vice president of Solutions Marketing and Strategy for GENBAND. Sanjay Bhatia oversees the company’s product marketing organisation and alignmnent of GENBAND’s go-to-market strategy across different market segments including NFV, Cloud, Enterprise Unified Communications, MSO and Wireless. Bhatia is an accomplished telecommunications professional with over 28 years of wide-ranging global experience.
Bhatia has held a variety of senior leadership roles in Product Marketing, Product Line Management, and Research & Development for leading technology companies. He possesses a strong track record of successfully introducing new technologies via innovative product and solutions launches. Bhatia is an accomplished speaker who has presented at several global events.
Prior to joining GENBAND, Bhatia served in senior business unit and marketing roles at Tekelec and various leadership positions at Nortel Networks. Bhatia holds bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech University.
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