Telcos Mobilizing to Drive NFV Adoption

Today the Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Project, a group comprised primarily of telco operators working across open source projects and vendors to implement Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) within their organizations. This is an exciting development because the market is growing quickly, and many OpenStack community members are also participating in OPNFV, giving us an opportunity to collaborate closely with another like-minded open source Foundation. User input is critical at this stage of a technology shift as significant as NFV will be for telco and even enterprise networks, and any organization that is willing to contribute knowledge and code to those efforts is welcome in the OpenStack community.

Much work has been done to build in support for NFV by the OpenStack community. Mark Lambe of SDN Central said on September 8, 2014:

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is now synonymous with OpenStack. When people say NFV, there is an implication that they are talking about OpenStack.”

Why is that? The open, modular and interoperable framework of the OpenStack project simplifies software. This flexibility is apparent in the OpenStack Networking component that features drivers and plug-ins from numerous leading telco vendors. Working through a project like OpenStack Networking, users do not have to worry about altering their APIs or modifying code if they decide to switch the underlying implementation technology. Much of the early interest surrounding NFV also led to updates in the OpenStack Compute component to meet the demanding requirements of the world’s leading operators.

After our OpenStack Summit in May, an NFV community team formed to accelerate development around NFV-specific features. Led by community member and former compute Program Technical Leader Russell Bryant, the group includes telco giants AT&T and Verizon as well as operators like Telefonica, Orange, and Portugal Telecom, and technology companies such as Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Red Hat, Canonical, Alcatel Lucent, Mirantis, eNovance, Wipro, Wind River, Cisco, NEC, Juniper, VMware, Mellanox, HP, and more. For more information on the technical progress being made to support NFV you can read Russell’s blog post on this topic. The momentum surrounding NFV continues as we gear up for the Juno software release and OpenStack Summit Paris, where NFV-related topics and panels will dominate our telco strategies programming track. We hope to see you soon in Paris to continue our NFV work and conversation November 3 – 7, 2014.

OpenStack Summit Paris NFV presentations and panels:

Previous OpenStack Summit NFV Talks of Note:

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