Red Hat and NEC Corporation have announced a collaboration to jointly develop network functions virtualisation (NFV) features in OpenStack in order to deliver carrier-grade NFV solutions with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
As communication service providers (CSPs) transform their businesses and modernise both their infrastructure and offerings, NFV enables them to deliver customer-facing services more easily and faster, with increased demand capacity. NEC’s NFV capabilities integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, are designed to enable CSPs to successfully implement these modernisation plans.
NEC and Red Hat have collaborated for more than a decade on joint open source software development. In recent years, the companies have focused their efforts on NFV system integration with OpenStack, leveraging NEC’s extensive knowledge of telecom networks. This enables the acceleration of NFV features in OpenStack and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in order to achieve carrier-grade and carrier-scale systems, including data plane acceleration through the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK).
Moreover, these efforts are being contributed to the upstream OpenStack community, to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to emerge as a leading cloud platform for NFV. Several of the NFV features resulting directly from this collaboration were included in the OpenStack Juno release, or are planned for the forthcoming OpenStack Kilo release.
Now, Red Hat and NEC aim to deliver a reliable, open, and scalable cloud platform for CSPs based on OpenStack, helping them to take advantage of NFV’s full potential. NEC’s NFV system integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform will be designed to deliver mobile packet core virtualisation, also known as virtualised Evolved Packet Core, or vEPC, as well as virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE). NEC and Red Hat plan to continue the expanded collaboration to integrate and optimise Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, along with contributions to open source communities, including OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).
“NFV offers tremendous potential to transform the telecommunications industry and radically change the way CSPs deliver solutions to their customers. NEC has long appreciated the power of ‘open’, and has always been an excellent partner. Through this expanded collaboration, Red Hat is excited to help meet CSP interest in NFV and open source cloud platforms – and more specifically, OpenStack, as they look for solutions to drive costs down and deliver new high value offerings,” said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president, Infrastructure Business Group, Red Hat.
“Through our long-term and continued collaboration with Red Hat, we are working to build an open industry standard which has enormous potential for expanding awareness and adoption of NFV. NEC, as a top 10 OpenStack contributor and a proven network vendor, aims to continue collaborating with Red Hat to drive innovation in the telecom industry through open source. NEC has commercially delivered SDN/NFV solutions, including vEPC and vCPE, and will continue driving innovation with broader virtualised network functions that promote greater agility, stability and security of services as well as new revenue creation while enabling a wide range of customers to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership,” commented Atsuo Kawamura, senior vice president, NEC Corporation.
