To enable service providers to try NFV, the portfolio for future networks from Amdocs is being redesigned. It is hoped this will allow communications and media companies to use NFV (network functions virtualisation) to deploy cloud-based, agile, on-demand services.
Software and services provider to communications and media companies, Amdocs today announced its Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) powered by Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). This is a portfolio featuring modular capabilities that are designed to accelerate service design, virtualisation and operating capabilities on demand.
The launch comes at a time when the company says secure and feature-rich communications are increasingly relevant to the digital needs of industry and society.
Talking to Jeremy Cowan of VanillaPlus ahead of tomorrow’s opening in San Francisco of Mobile World Congress Americas, Amdocs’ Tzvika Naveh says, “Service providers are embracing open source. They want to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). We did a poll on open source — especially in higher (executive) levels — and there are still barriers in the maturity and stability of platforms. This is where Amdocs will harden the ONAP code.”
“Service providers need a blueprint to handle digital and modular capabilities. “We’ll introduce a hosting environment,” he adds. “We’ll place models on the public cloud to test functions in the virtual environment, like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).”
The thinking is that this will enable service providers to try NFV.
The ONAP Project is said by its proponents to bring together top global carriers and vendors with the goal of allowing end users to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions. ONAP unites two major open networking and orchestration projects, open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), in order to create a unified architecture and implementation and supporting collaboration across the open source community. The ONAP Project is a Linux Foundation project.
As the communications and media industry moves from static appliance-based networks to software based, elastic networks, carriers will be increasingly capable of providing services and capacity on demand or based on predictive traffic patterns. Instead of building networks for high peak periods, carriers want to spin them up dynamically to provide better network services in the right locations at lower price points. Service providers using technologies developed in ONAP and its ecosystem of capabilities can provide enterprises the ability to design their own networks as part of a richer set of service features.
Carriers, therefore, demand network virtualisation software that is capacity-aware, and created using open source technology from ONAP by a system of partners. Amdocs NFV powered by ONAP is said to be “the first and most comprehensive software and services offering” that leverages open source networking technology, and can be deployed either locally or in the public cloud using modern DevOps adoption techniques.
As a founding creator of a number of significant modules of ONAP, Amdocs retains first-mover advantage with important modules like Amdocs Service Design and Create to automate service design, and Amdocs Active Inventory for a unified live view of services powered by ONAP. These contributions mean Amdocs has already been working with many early adopter and galaxy operators including work on pragmatic approaches to manage service design and creation, on-boarding of virtualised service functions, monitoring of active inventory in hybrid networks and the continuous, elastic maintenance of the network itself.
This addresses the needs of operators seeking adaptable, scalable, software-driven networks based on cloud and microservices technologies. For testing and verifying virtual services on ONAP’s open source platform, Amdocs offers easy deployment of ONAP and a cloud-based hosting environment complemented with pre-defined SD-WAN acceleration kit and administration tools to fast track proof of concepts and use case validation.
For testing and verifying virtual services on ONAP’s open source platform, Amdocs reportedly offers easy deployment of ONAP and a cloud-based hosting environment complemented with pre-defined SD-WAN acceleration kit and administration tools to fast-track proof of concepts and use case validation.
“Amdocs brings unique expertise derived from working with ONAP’s early adopters, including North American carriers that include Bell, and European carriers such as Orange, to help service providers drive value from virtualisation and this offering lays the framework for additional carrier-grade enhancements as the ONAP code matures,” says Gary Miles, general manager at Amdocs. “Open source brings unparalleled agility and innovation to the market. In such a dynamic environment, it is important that the industry is able to package open source contributions into a mature capability set for live network operations.”
Miles continues, “This is what we have achieved with the Amdocs NFV powered by ONAP professional portfolio. It represents a brand new frontier for the communications and media industry and addresses the many time to market challenges facing carriers who want to rapidly launch new virtual services, and gain the future proof advantages of ONAP open source technology today.”
“Amdocs’ open network partner ecosystem of vendors has created more than 80 Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), delivering innovative NFV use-cases that speed up complex multi-vendor service deployments. This is complemented by a portfolio of professional services to fast-track NFV strategic planning, implementation and operations/assurance, as well as integration to existing operational and business support systems, essential to commercialising virtual network services for our customers now and in the future.”
“We want to accelerate NFV adoption,” Naveh comments, “and there’s a need for standardisation. But we can’t wait for that. Since we think that open source (and ONAP is an open source) will become a de facto standard of open source platform we invested in a lot of tools to make sure that this will take place.”
For more information on ONAP, go to https://www.onap.org
Click here to see Gary Miles talking about ONAP on Youtube.
