VMware upgrades NFV platform to help make 5G cost-effective

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VMware has announced the next generation of its NFV platform for telcos that it says will enable breakthrough improvements in network performance, new carrier-grade networking capabilities, and intent-based service assurance to help improve the total economics of 5G and multi-cloud telco networks.

VMware says its new vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 delivers a 5G-ready NFV infrastructure platform, tuned to support rapid rollout of next-generation services with low latency and high network throughput, and support for a massively distributed set of end points and devices. VMware vCloud NFV enables cloud service providers to create an end-to-end software-based network architecture to deliver consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security to applications and network functions wherever they are located, at global scale from core to cloud to edge, and independent of underlying physical infrastructure or location.

“With the expected rollout of 5G globally by 2020 … a new approach to the telco network and cloud is required to solve challenges associated with the hyper distribution of virtual network functions, applications and data,” said Sanjay K. Deshmukh, vice president and managing director South East Asia and Korea, VMware. “With VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0, service providers will be able to build software-defined, programmable, highly-distributed telco clouds based on open standards to deliver new advanced services to consumers, and quality-of-service-based network slices to serve the application needs for a wide variety of industries.”

“Service providers are being pressed to deliver new and differentiated services faster, in an on-demand model, and maintain a high quality of experience for the user,” said Emily Ng, Regional Sales Director, VMware. “This requires a new architecture for network functions virtualization, while creating a delivery method that will support an all-IP infrastructure.”

Key advancements in the newest release of vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0 include:

Accelerated performance: vCloud NFV-OpenStack delivers accelerated data plane network performance, which can dramatically increase efficiency, while preserving all the existing benefits of VMware’s NFV infrastructure. VMware’s advanced networking architecture delivered through new high-performance switching, enhanced platform awareness, and more secure multi-tenancy, is transparent to virtual network functions (VNF) providers, and delivers kernel-based security, deterministic resource allocation, linear scalability, and consistent multi-flow performance. Beta tests by customers such as NTT Com, Telia Company, and Telefonica of the new NSX Managed Virtual Distributed Switch in Enhanced Data Path mode have shown network performance improvements of 3-5x depending on packet size, VMware says.

Carrier-grade networking: vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0 will deliver a range of new carrier-oriented networking capabilities and enable the extension of the virtual cloud network to CSPs. The platform will deliver:

  • Increased network resiliency through fast link failure detection and bare-metal edge networking support with extended security, performance, and policy management
  • Network slicing using micro-segmentation enabling CSPs with the flexibility to allocate QoS, security, availability, and other policies in a virtual network slice that can be delivered to support different business segments
  • Native support for the container networking interface for container-based workloads and microservices
  • Multi-cloud networking and security enabling operational control and visibility into heterogeneous environments spanning data centers, public and telco clouds and edge environments.

Intent-based service assurance: With intent-based assurance CSPs in the country can define operational and business intent for the network and continuously verify performance against the defined intent through Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2 operations. New capabilities include service onboarding and operations; capacity planning, forecasting and reclamation; advanced issue isolation and remediation; and dynamic performance optimization.

Meanwhile, as networks evolve to deliver new revenue streams from 5G and telco cloud services, VMware says the new enhancements enable enhanced economic value through:

  • Accelerated time to revenue of new consumer and enterprise services through common NFV infrastructure and operations platform.
  • Lower total infrastructure costs and ongoing power, cooling and rack space required through new DPDK-based networking; reduce or eliminate networking and security infrastructure costs through inclusion of distributed firewalling and load balancing; unify telco and IT cloud infrastructure to help maximize return from capital and operational expenditure in equipment, tooling and training.
  • Optimized operations: increased network efficiencies and reduced operational costs through predictive analytics that can project future requirements and automatically balance workloads to optimize network performance; more efficient operations and increased cost savings through a real-time predictive capacity analytics engine that proactively detects capacity risks, automates resource reclamation, and right sizes resources; superior QoS and lower customer churn through intelligent remediation capabilities that can better predict, prevent, and troubleshoot faster.
  • Better TCO for OpenStack NFV: According to figures from AGC Research, OpenStack NFV delivers 45% lower total opex for OpenStack over a five-year period versus leading alternative; 83% lower total hardware and software capex versus competitive alternative; support for 33% more subscribers in the same period of time and using the same amount of money as would be possible to activate using the competitive solution.

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