During recent months, we have published technical reviews on latest platform related solutions: SDN, NFV and OpenStack. Our technical review this month is on how Telecommunication industry can use OpenStack as cloud infrastructure for implementing NFV and SDN, in order to reduce costs and increase competitiveness.
OpenStack as Telecom platform for SDN and NFV strategy
Over the past
decade, the IT industry has experienced significant changes brought on by the
widespread adoption of virtualized technology and cloud based data centers. The
need for scalability, reduced infrastructure cost, optimized operation ,
maintenance, and speed to market with new applications are a few of the key
factors that drove this revolution.
More
recently, enterprises increasingly look to open source cloud solutions, and
OpenStack specifically as the leading open source cloud technology.
In the
Telecommunication industry, Network Operators and Telco are now facing the same
challenges and require similar core architectural advances. Their networks are
comprised of large, siloes proprietary platforms that are becoming increasingly
difficult to scale, manage, and operate. The primary challenge is how to
quickly deploy and operationalize new services while maintaining economic
efficiencies.
Often,
the cost and complexity are amplified because the hardware-based appliances
that are dedicated to performing a single function within the network have
short lifecycles and consume large amounts of space and power. And, the rapid
growth of data and multimedia applications is causing exploding network traffic
at the same time that NO revenues from new services are stagnating.
The
combination of market conditions and network constraints is demanding
that Network Operators and Telco pursue a cloud based approach much like
that adopted by the IT industry. However, technologies and design principles
used as the basis for typical IT cloud applications cannot be applied directly
to network services without accounting for carrier-grade requirements.
Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV), coupled with Software Defined Networking (SDN),
offer a way for Network Operators and Telco to address these problems. By
deploying OpenStack as the enabling cloud platform, NOs have a proven way to
implement NFV and SDN to leverage the benefits of open source software to
further reduce costs and position themselves as competitive.
The
Telecommunication industry currently stands on the cusp of a new era in network
management. SDN and NFS promise to revolutionize the industry by enabling
carriers to have more dynamic control over their resources and environments.
This new-found level of control will allow Network Operators and Telcos to make
real-time adjustments to network conditions as needed, diverting assets to
high-volume users or redirecting traffic in the event of a localized outage.
Given such bold
assertions, mobile operators may wonder how exactly they can come to obtain
these capabilities. The answer is cloud-based computing and network platforms –
most notably, OpenStack.