Verizon has completed what it claims is the industry’s largest known network functions virtualisation OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its US data centres.
The NFV project, which began in 2015, created a production design based on a core and pod architecture that provides the hyperscale capabilities and flexibility necessary to meet the company’s complex network requirements. Deployments are currently in progress in additional domestic data centre and aggregation sites, with international locations to be deployed over the next several months. The design also will be adopted in edge network sites by the end of the year.
Verizon worked with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat to develop the OpenStack pod-based design that went from concept to deployment of more than 50 racks in five production data centers in less than nine months. To validate the resiliency of the NFV pod design at scale, the collaborators constructed and tested large scale test beds mirroring the production design, using the open source community to ultimately deliver a high quality, validated NFV pod architecture.
The project is based on OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor deployment uses Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric for SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are orchestrated by Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
“Building on our history of innovation, this NFV project is another step in building Verizon’s next-generation network – with implications for the industry,” said Adam Koeppe, the vice president for network technology planning at Verizon. “New and emerging applications are highlighting the need for collaborative research and development in technologies like NFV. We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app.”
Kyle Forster, the co-founder of Big Switch Networks, added: “More than ever before, it is imperative that leaders in our community work together to design, build and deploy pod designs that are both agile and resilient,” he said. “As OpenStack proves itself under intense conditions like those created by large scale NFV workloads, it is increasingly important for an open and collaborative environment to deliver positive results.”
