Overture, in its announcement yesterday, said that Masergy, the largest independent cloud network provider in the world, deployed its Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solution along with NFV solutions from other leading players in networking - Brocade, Fortinet and Intel - to become the first service provider to deploy carrier-class, pure-play NFV at the edge of the network.
Masergy’s NFV deployment, Virtual f(n)™ sees NFV solutions from these companies deployed in a distributed model as part of Masergy's ongoing network evolution that aims to gain greater service agility and provide customers with the services they want in real-time. The Virtual f(n)™ is based on the Overture Ensemble Carrier Ethernet (ECE), Brocade's Vyatta 5600 vRouter and Fortinet's FortiGate-VM firewall virtualized network functions (VNFs) running on the Overture 65vSE VNF compute node platform, based on the Intel® Atom processor, at the customer premise.
According to Overture, these open software solutions are optimized for performance with the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), resulting in Gigabit throughput on par with appliance-based Carrier Ethernet 2.0 performance. The improved agility, said Overture, leads toward significant revenue upside, as Masergy is now able to deliver new and advanced premium services quickly and easily.
Tim Naramore, Masergy’s Chief Technology Officer
Our primary focus is on service agility and our pure-play NFV deployment sets the stage for immediate response to customer requests. Masergy has long been an innovator, providing our customers with solutions that give them real-time control and the ability to get the services they need, when they want them. With this launch, we’re adding incredibly agile and flexible solutions to our Managed Network f(n)™ family of distributed, fully managed network functions.
Prayson Pate, Overture’s Chief Technology Officer
The promise of pure software-based NFV has become a reality. Other operators have been taking a hybrid approach, using software functionality in existing Layer 2 devices or leveraging proprietary features in backbone switching equipment to deliver NFV-like services. Masergy’s deployment, with our Ensemble Carrier Ethernet platform as the foundation, shows how a completely software-defined NFV environment can deliver performance comparable to today’s hardware-based solutions.
