Telefónica has announced last Wednesday it plans to work with Red Hat and Intel to create a virtual infrastructure management (VIM) platform, pushing a step ahead in its UNICA Infrastructure initiative, a reference architecture to boost the adoption of virtualized network equipment in Telefónica networks. The new virtualization platform will be based on open source software running on standard Intel-based servers.
The Spanish Telecom giant with the vision of “Open Digital Telco”, has recently created Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Reference Lab aimed at helping their ecosystem of partners and network equipment providers (NEPs) test and develop virtual network functions along with upper service orchestration layers. Through development of this lab, Telefónica will work with Red Hat and Intel to create a solution based on open source standards to help prevent fragmentation and lock-in while maintaining the level of performance and resilience communications service providers (CSPs) have come to expect from their existing hardware-centric solutions.
The NFV Reference Lab will be equiped with Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 V2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and OpenFlow-enabled switching equipment.
In support of the lab, Telefónica, Red Hat, and Intel will each commit engineering and testing resources, in open collaboration with partners and the open source community, to enable these technologies to achieve the required levels of performance and functionality of NFV.
”For NFV we need to avoid closed and non-interoperable environments, which would hamper its widespread adoption. For that purpose, we have launched the Network Functions Virtualisation Reference Lab, where Telefónica, along with key players from the industry, is working to enhance baseline virtualisation technologies from the open source community and contributing them back to the upstream community, to avoid technological fragmentation.”
- Enrique Algaba, Network Innovation and Virtualisation Director, Telefonica 1+D, Global CTO
“Red Hat is currently the leading contributor to the upstream Linux kernel, KVM, and OpenStack projects which create a foundation for NFV workloads. This deep experience in the open source community, along with Red Hat’s focus on performance, reliability and security, offers CSPs a unique value proposition. We’re thrilled to bring our technical expertise, community experience and product offerings including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to the collaboration with Telefónica and Intel to help CSPs reap the benefits of NFV first hand.”
- Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat
“By applying our experience of cloud technologies and business models along with our server and virtualization technology leadership to NFV applications, Intel aims to improve total cost of ownership and reduce time-to-market for applications for service providers, Through our work with Telefonica and Red Hat on this new lab, we will enable a broader ecosystem of developers that will accelerate the commercial availability of NFV solutions.”NFV is highly expected to bring changes in the ecosystem of network industries. Nonetheless, unless there's a high degree of collaboration between players, this would end up being a pie in the sky. Therefore I am delighted that we can successfully collaborate on PoC with NEC."
- Rose Schooler, Vice President and General Manager, Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group, Intel
