Partnerships have become an important aspect shaping the telecommunications software market, as companies look to bolster their ideas in the space with the help of friends.
The latest to expand its network is Wind River, which announced Hewlett-Packard had joined its Titanium Cloud partner program launched earlier this year. Wind River said work with HP on the program will include validating Wind River’s network function virtualization software solution running across HP’s ProLiant servers for applications operating in the NFV space.
Wind River said the ecosystem program is designed to ensure the availability of interoperable hardware and software solutions for telecom equipment vendors deploying products based on NFV. The program initially launched with five members: Brocade, Genband, Metaswitch Networks, Nakina Systems and Overture.
“Service providers and TEMs can confidently select these hardware and software products knowing that they have been pre-integrated and validated with Wind River NFV solutions, and are available for deployment in live networks,” the company explained.
HP’s contribution in its ProLiant servers is based on an Intel architecture said to be ideal for NFV implementations, with claims of extended lifecycles, and NEBS and ETSI certifications. Wind River noted that its NFV software has been “validated and optimized” on HP’s DL380 and DL360 servers, with work on the BL460c server set “to follow.”
Wind River and HP had previously announced plans to team up on a certification process to create a carrier-grade NFV-ready server platform. Wind River claims its NFV solution can support up to six-nines (99.9999%) reliability, which would seem to quell concerns about telecom companies moving services to a virtualized environment.
Wind River earlier this year launched its Carrier Grade Communications Server, which it said was designed for NFV deployment and to integrate with existing networks. The company said the platform allows operators to migrate their networks to NFV architectures while maintaining “carrier grade” attributes. The platform is based on Wind River’s Open Virtualization with Wind River Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, enhancements to OpenStack and Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit accelerated VSwitch technologies. Wind River noted that the offering can run commercial off-the-shelf hardware, including the HP ProLiant servers and Intel Xeon processors powering infrastructure equipment.
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter?
