ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) have formed a strategic partnership on the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) specifications and advances in the open networking. Both the standard bodies will explore on solutions for new NFV use cases, riding on the SDN to enable forwarding plane, including to build dynamic, programmable Virtualized Network Function (VNF) forwarding graphs.
In conjunction with this, ETSI plans to use NFV Proofs of Concept (PoC) that will showcase the benefits of NFV and SDN technologies, while ONF is also releasing the OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief that explains the benefits for operators. The NFV solution brief also discusses the network challenges and how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can accelerate NFV deployments for operators.
“ETSI is focused on addressing the problems that telecommunications networks face today by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage,” said Luis Jorge Romero Saro, director-general of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. “This collaboration with ONF allows us to both significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, and serve as a relevant source for requirements and use cases for the SDN community.”
"The goal of the ONF relationship with the ETSI NFV ISG to further the adoption of NFV by network operators.” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “Together, we can serve as a critical source of requirements and solutions for the open networking community. Both organizations will benefit from sharing technical work and adopting a complementary approach to the development of standards, methodologies, and knowledge sharing.”