Napatech discusses the role of NFV in moving telecom into the cloud
As carriers gradually work out how to automate increasingly complex networks, NFV is the clear solution, but deployment has been slow. Management and orchestration have been stumbling blocks, but major progress has been made, particularly with the Linux Foundation’s ONAP. But now, “The frameworks are starting to come into place,” Dan Joe Barry, Napatech vice president of positioning and chief evangelist, said. “There’re real solutions that are being deployed and are getting hardened. Now you’ve got the management and orchestration layer.”
During a recent interview, Barry said passive monitoring solutions currently used by carriers aren’t ready for the level of automation that will come with network functions virtualization. He gave credit to the Metro Ethernet Forum’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration reference architecture as “crucial” in providing an overview of end-to-end service automation across multiple carrier networks.
During Mobile World Congress 2017, Barry participated in a panel discussion on NFV. In a follow up blog post, he reflected on the importance of MEF’s LSO reference architecture: “That is the ability to automate service delivery and enable greater agility in responding to changing market demands. I don’t know if everyone really appreciates how much of a revolution this is for carrier organizations. While, in the past, significant efforts have been made in establishing end-to-end management frameworks based on TMForum recommendations, these OSS/BSS solutions were largely static and reactive. The vast majority of processes were and still are manual in nature taking a lot of resources and time to complete.”
Napatech specializes on what it calls “smarter data delivery,” and provides telecom, cloud, data center, network management, infrastructure, financial, cyber security and other solutions. In terms of NFV enablement, Barry said the company is focusing on three areas: accelerating virtual switches; maximizing single-core throughput; and hardware acceleration. There’s all these things coming together now,” he said. “The final piece of the puzzle then is implementing, being able to see what’s going on. These are all for us fundamental capabilities that we have to baked into the NFV infrastructure.”
Barry, in his blog post, addressed these trends in the context of the internet of things and 5G: “Investment in 5G deployments are progressing despite the lack of standards as carriers prepare for the IoT wave set to engulf us. SDN and NFV are cornerstones of current 5G architecture designs and will be essential in meeting the lofty ambitions of 5G architects. But, the real drive for investment must surely be that carriers need to transform their organizations and operations from utility providers to cloud service providers. In my final statement in the panel discussion, I made the point that in a few years, there might not even be a “telecom” industry, but that we would all be working in the cloud industry.”
As far as NFV goes, “The ice is breaking,” Barry told RCR Wireless News. “We’ve been in a trough of disillusionment. I do believe all the stuff going on with MANO has moved a lot of those concerns away. I’m hearing from customers there is stuff starting to move right now. But now is the time to get back to the NFV infrastructure. Do we have an NFV instructure that’s better for automation and service agility?”
