NFV/SDN Reality Check: Episode 2

RCR Wireless News’ weekly NFV/SDN Reality Check looks at top headlines of the week, has an interview with Overture CTO Prayson Pate looking at new products and some NFV perspective from the company, and provides insight into how NFV works from NetAmerica Alliance.
First, the Linux Foundation’s recently launched Open Platform for NFV Project expanded its membership role as well as announced a director to head up the OPNFV plans to provide a “carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services” tied to network function virtualization.
OPNFV’s new members include Enea, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Spirent and Xilinx, pushing the organization’s total member count to 49. OPNFV launched last September with a list of companies participating in the NFV and software-defined networking space, including “Platinum” members AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DoCoMo, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone.
Linux explained that due to the multiple open-source NFV initiatives already in place, the OPNFV will look to work with “upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.” The project is set to initially work on building NFV infrastructure and virtualized infrastructure management tapping into existing open-source components.
OPNFV also named Heather Kirksey as director to work with members to further the goals of the organization. Kirksey’s previous experience was at open-source organizations, including MongoDB, as well as with established telecom players like Alcatel-Lucent and the Broadband Forum.
Kontron joins Alcatel-Lucent cloud ecosystem
Kontron announced it has joined Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem Program, which is focused on developing NFV-based solutions. In joining the program, Kontron said it is looking to increase the appeal of its Symkloud Series hardware platform to service providers adopting the CloudBand architecture.
Alcatel-Lucent initially launched the program in late 2013, noting it was looking to accelerate the development and adoption of NFV by allowing developers and vendors to access tools and test apps within a simulated cloud environment before putting them on a service provider’s network.
SDN holds early mindshare lead over NFV
A new report from Argus Insights shows that software-defined networking maintained a healthy mindshare lead over network function virtualization during the past two months, citing data collected from blogs, message boards, Facebook and Twitter.
The firm noted that “relative mindshare reflects the expected revenue growth over the next two to three years.”
Overture talks new product, NFV trends
RCR Wireless News spoke with Prayson Pate, CTO at Overture on the company’s latest Ensemble Service Intelligence platform, which is designed to automate orchestration processes across NFV deployments.
Pate also provided insight into challenges facing the current NFV market and trends he sees coming down the road in 2015.
How NFV works
Finally, Ely Compean, SVP of NetAmerica Alliance, provided our weekly “How it works” show with an in-depth look at how NFV works. It’s definitely worth a look.
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