ETSI’s Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualisation (ETSI NFV) has convened an industry workshop to align cloud-centric initiatives and network-centric initiatives to ensure successful realization of NFV through automation.
The workshop brought together the leading Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) and Open Source communities in an ‘NFV Village’. The workshop was hosted by CableLabs at its Louisville, Colorado (USA) location.
This was a significant event because it is the first time the key standards organisations and open source communities representing a broad and diverse ecosystem have met together with a common purpose to accelerate alignment of their activities in relation to NFV.
Participating organisations included 3GPP, ATIS, Broadband Forum, DMTF, ETSI NFV, IETF, ITU-T SG 15, MEF, OASIS/TOSCA, Open Cloud Connect, ONF, OpenDaylight, OPNFV and TM-Forum. Organisations that did not participate in this workshop are welcome to get involved in this collaboration.
Development of NFV started at ETSI in January 2013 in response to the call to action in the joint-carrier white paper published in October 2012 which introduced the NFV concept. The ETSI NFV community has grown to almost 300 organisations and has delivered key NFV specifications covering requirements, use cases, architectural framework, terminology, management & orchestration, security, performance and reliability. It has also sponsored multi-vendor proofs of concepts to encourage interoperability and growth of an open ecosystem around virtualised network functions.
“ETSI NFV ISG is pleased to foster increased collaboration among key industry bodies to enable increased automation and reduced operational costs, which service providers look for when initiating work on NFV,” said Steven Wright (AT&T), Chair, ETSI NFV ISG.
The workshop was co-chaired by ETSI NFV Vice-chair Michael Brenner (ClearPath Networks) and Klaus Martiny (Deutsche Telekom), ETSI NFV Network Operator Council Vice-chair. A collaboration plan was agreed to achieve meaningful progress in addressing the challenges and opportunities identified in the workshop by the end of 2016. The first feedback from participating organizations will be in March 2016. The participating organisations will independently progress their work mindful of the collaboration milestones and regular conference calls will take place to monitor progress and when necessary another workshop will be convened to progress alignment.
Don Clarke (CableLabs), chair of the ETSI NFV Network Operator Council said: “It was a privilege for CableLabs to be able to host this unique event which brought together over 90 of the world’s leading experts on information modelling. A delegate from a leading European operator told me that he sees this multi-SDO collaboration as being the key to unlocking the barriers to NFV adoption. The operator group will continue to be actively involved to facilitate this industry collaboration and to help ensure it delivers what the industry needs for NFV.”
