China Mobile adds Mirantis, ARM, Cavium and Enea to Open NFV Lab

China Mobile announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mirantis (via its Chinese unit UMCloud), ARM, Cavium and Enea, the third batch of companies to partner with the China Mobile Open NFV Lab.

These four partners will carry out a series of tests with multiple NFV typical scenarios and services.

China Mobile Open NFV Lab was established in 2015 to provide an international and open test environment for the industry. The first of its kind in Asia, the lab has been certified by OPNFV as part of its testing infrastructure.

In July 2015, China Mobile signed an MoU with the first batch of nine partners, including Huawei, Red Hat, and WindRiver. In January 2016, China Mobile signed an MoU with the second batch of 4 partners, including Ericsson and H3C. Now the lab has 17 partners, ranging from IT providers to communication technology companies, including chip manufacturers, hardware vendors, NFV platform vendors, virtual network function (VNF) manufacturers and test instrument manufacturers.

The lab has made big progress since its foundation; it has finished vIMS, vEPC and other multi-vendor tests. It has also promoted the integration and testing of the OPNFV open source platform and multiple commercial NFV platforms. The test results of this lab are also output to the China Mobile NovoNet test network to carry out large-scale tests and validation.

Mirantis says its Managed OpenStack departs from the traditional software-centric method that revolves around licensing and support subscriptions. Instead, Mirantis is taking an operations-centric approach, where open infrastructure is continuously delivered with operations SLAs owned by either Mirantis or the customer. Now, software updates no longer happen once every 6-12 months, but are introduced in minor increments on a weekly basis and with no down time.

“Since launching Mirantis Cloud Platform just three weeks ago, we have made significant announcements with Vodafone, Fujitsu, and now China Mobile,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis CMO and co-founder. “Companies are rapidly cloudifying their businesses and telcos are in the forefront of this trend. OpenStack is making it possible.”