Verizon said it recently completed NFV OpenStack cloud deployments across five U.S. data centers, with international and edge network push by year-end
Verizon Communications claims it recently completed the industry’s largest known network functions virtualization OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its U.S. data centers.
The telecom giant said the deployment created a “production design based on a core and pod architecture that provides the hyperscale capabilities and flexibility necessary to meet the company’s complex network requirements.” Verizon said deployments are currently in progress across additional domestic data centers and aggregation sites; that it plans for international location deployments over the next several months; and expects design adoption in edge network sites by the end of the year.
“We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app,” explained Adam Koeppe, VP for network technology planning at Verizon.
The deployment included support from Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat, with claims the OpenStack pod-based design moving from concept to deployment of more than 50 racks in the five data centers in less than nine months. The partners were said to have constructed and tested large-scale test beds mirroring the production design to validate resiliency at scale, and leveraged the open source community to deliver the NFV pod architecture.
The project used OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform; leveraged Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric for software-defined networking controller software managing Dell switches; and was orchestrated by the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The NFV pod design is said to accommodate “unique NFV workloads with unique logical network requirements that share the same physical leaf/spine fabric and [virtual switches].”
Verizon last year announced SDN plans with five vendors: Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper Networks and Nokia Networks. As part of the announcement, Verizon said it had been working on the move toward virtualized platforms over the past several years, including the creation of live lab environments in San Jose, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; and Waltham, Mass., and claims to have commercial data center environments on both coasts.
The carrier earlier this year joined the Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project in a move to work with ONOS members on solutions targeting the development of scalable SDN architectures.
RCR Wireless News recently interviewed Gagan Puranik, director of SDN/NFV network architecture planning for Verizon, to gain some insight into the company’s continued software push, its view on the pace of development and challenges with standards; and Shawn Hakl, VP of enterprise networking and innovation at Verizon, to get his insight into the telecom operator’s push into software, challenges it has seen in that migration and hurdles it expects to encounter in the future.
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