NFV and OpenStack trends

Red Hat remains focused on expanding, enhancing the NFV and OpenStack environment

Open source continues to be a strong undercurrent in the move by telecom operators towards virtualized platforms using network functions virtualization, software-defined networking and cloud. One of the larger players in the open source space is Red Hat, which has worked through its OpenStack platform to bolster the cause of open source.

On this week’s NFV/SDN Reality Check show we talked with Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM of OpenStack at Red Hat, to get an update on the company’s work in the telecom NFV and SDN environment, as well as advances in the OpenStack standard. Balakrishnan also tackled claims that OpenStack was perhaps not agile enough to handle the telecom market’s SDN needs, noting the OpenStack community has worked hard to ensure the standard remains open enough to support expected deployment models.

That support was backed this week as AT&T, Ericsson and chipmaker Apcera demonstrated the deployment of a telco virtualized network function in a platform-as-a-service environment that is integrated with OpenStack. The proof-of-concept was said to show audio and video communications between multiple Web browsers utilizing the virtualized Web communications gateway deployed in an OpenStack-integrated PaaS environment.

Make sure to join us on Nov. 6 for our next episode of NFV/SDN Reality Check when we speak with Bill Kaufmann, group manager of SDN Planning at Coriant, on the benefits of SDN implementation for mobile networks.

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