At Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona, HP (HPQ) introduced OpenNFV, a telecom-focused Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) program designed to help launch new services faster and cheaper. The new program enables communication service providers (CSPs) to accelerate time to market by leveraging commercial off-the-shelf hardware with virtualization to test and deploy new offerings in minutes rather than months.
"NFV represents one of the most significant shifts the telecommunications industry has experienced in 20 years," said Martin Fink, executive vice president and chief technology officer at HP. "HP's Open NFV Program combines HP's technology leadership with a strong partner ecosystem to enable our customers to leverage new market opportunities faster while managing spiraling costs."
NFV Reference Architecture
To aid the new program HP has appointed Bethany Mayer to assume responsibility for leading HP's NFV strategy. The companywide effort leverages the breadth and depth of HP's innovation portfolio to launch an open standards-based NFV Reference architecture, HP OpenNFV Labs, and a partner ecosystem of best-in-class NFV applications and services. HP also brings more than 30 years of telco-specific experience, along with more than 5,000 telco professionals to this new offering, ensuring that carriers have a tried and tested partner supporting them on their NFV journey.
HP's OpenNFV Reference Architecture (NFV RA), provides a complete architectural ecosystem covering physical servers, storage and networking, virtualization, controllers for software-defined networking (SDN), resource management and orchestration, analytics, telco applications, and a complete operations support system (OSS). It is based on open standards, and brings a set of HP’s industry-standard products and capabilities to easily build and deploy the architecture. The HP NFV RA incorporates the HP Virtual Services Router, which is designed to support various virtualized appliances such as multitenant hosted public clouds and virtualized branch Customer Premise Equipment deployments.
Driving Better Agility
“In the environments we work in, it’s key that we have agility and flexibility in what we offer our customers,” said Roy Kaser, chief technology officer and vice president, IP Platforms, Alcatel Lucent. “We partnered with HP because they are a leader in both open systems and in virtualization, which is an important strategy for us going forward. We can rely on HP for their expertise in NFV and in x86 technology, which enables us to free up R&D investment dollars to focus more on innovative software technology.”
Several updated telco applications and offerings are being launched as part of the HP OpenNFV Program, including HP Virtual Home Subscriber Server, HP Multimedia Services Environment, HP Virtual Content Delivery Network Software, HP Financial services, and NFV Consulting Services. HP is exhibiting OpenNFV Program solutions with proof-of-concept demonstrations at Mobile World Congress.
