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In an industry that is constantly and rapidly evolving, the bar to earn the title of “transformative moment” is high. And yet, we are at just such a moment. In pursuit of operational efficiency and lower capital expenses, service providers have spent some time vetting the concept of network functions virtualization. They have found that by moving network functions to software and leveraging commercially available server and virtualization technology, they can not only cut costs, but also speed the rollout of new services. Virtualization is the future of carrier networks, and that future is near.
NFV is an initiative that was articulated in a white paper put forth by 13 service providers last October at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Germany. It espoused a concept to improve operational efficiency in telecom environments through better leveraging data center and software virtualization technology in place of proprietary hardware solutions. Subsequently, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute Industry Specification Group on NFV was established and has grown to roughly 40 members and close to 200 participants. Everyone involved in the ETSI NFV group, from equipment and software vendors to service providers, has been working together to research more about NFV, SDN, and the policy and orchestration issues of the technology, and, to actually implement and test virtualized equipment that is telecom carrier-grade. Many network vendors designed equipment in the last year to advance the NFV movement, and although there has been little in the way of large deployments of the technology, the market has learned a lot about how to achieve the NFV benefits highlighted in the original ETSI white paper. Below are a few areas in which the NFV technology that is available today will impact service providers.
The inevitability of NFV
Many of the major carriers in the industry are on board with NFV, but the concept will have far-reaching effects on others, as well. Smaller service providers, enterprises, equipment manufacturers and consumers will feel the effects as NFV adoption rapidly escalates. There are three reasons why that outcome is all but inevitable:
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Reduced operating costs: NFV cuts the costs associated with hardware, housing and upkeep. This is the next logical step beyond commercial off-the-shelf hardware (COTS); NFV anticipates operational cost savings by deploying a more uniform base of physical platforms and also takes advantage of benefits that virtualization brings to the table like elasticity, on-demand deployment of capacity and infrastructure reuse. Just as the economics behind the industry shift to COTS were too positive to resist, those associated with NFV are similarly compelling.
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Faster deployments: Providers see a potential for significant increases in service velocity when they move beyond legacy equipment and embrace more efficient, virtualized options. While there won’t be an industry-wide swing overnight, the foundation for realizing NFV benefits is already in place. The ability to reduce time-to-market and selectively introduce virtualized applications into the service delivery infrastructure is available today. Software-based infrastructure such as session border controllers (SBCs) and media servers are already deployed, and we’ll see common management capabilities for these resources, as well.
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Scalability: By lowering the barriers to entry, NFV allows service providers to expand their customer bases without oppressive capital investments. In application-specific hardware environments, carriers lose the ability to scale up and scale down. With NFV, the scalability of the systems is inherent in the very nature of virtualized environments. With higher returns on investment within reach due to scalability and elasticity and lower operating expenses associated with energy and space requirements, carriers will migrate away from their proprietary hardware-based solutions to software-based technology. The market is making this move, starting at the network edge and progressing to the core.
 2014: The year of NFV
When we recently raised the question of NFV adoption in a survey of leading international telecom carriers and service providers, 80 percent of the respondents said they plan to leverage virtualized solutions in the coming year. The networking functions that were until now performed exclusively by discrete hardware specific platforms such as routers and switches, SBCs, feature servers, and evolved packet core nodes and more are now set for transformation. NFV will serve as a common platform from which network operators can roll out new services to more customers for less cost. The result will be lower power consumption, less reliance on expensive hardware, more cloud-based choices and significantly higher ROI.
Jim Machi is VP of product management at Dialogic, where he is responsible for driving the overall roadmap and product strategy for the company. Follow Jim on Twitter: @JMachiDialogic
