NFV Adoption to Transform Telecommunications Infrastructure Lee Doyle
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NFV adoption to transform telecommunications infrastructure Lee Doyle February 25, 2014 This report is underwritten by Wind River. TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive summary ................................................................................................................................... 3 Introducing NFV ........................................................................................................................................ 4 SDN in the telecom network .................................................................................................................. 4 Role of IT hardware and software in the telecom network ..................................................................... 5 Challenges of telecom virtualization ...................................................................................................... 6 Benefits of NFV ......................................................................................................................................... 8 NFV use cases ........................................................................................................................................ 10 Different stages of NFV ........................................................................................................................... 11 Migration to COTS ............................................................................................................................... 11 Virtualization of software functions ...................................................................................................... 11 Elasticity capacity ................................................................................................................................ 11 Orchestration of multiple virtual functions ............................................................................................ 12 Current status of NFV.............................................................................................................................. 13 Role of the NEPs ................................................................................................................................. 13 Role of the IT suppliers ....................................................................................................................... 13 Impact of the ISV community ............................................................................................................... 13 The NFV software stack providers .......................................................................................................... 17 Wind River........................................................................................................................................... 18 MontaVista .......................................................................................................................................... 20 Linaro .................................................................................................................................................. 20 VMWare .............................................................................................................................................. 20 Redhat ................................................................................................................................................ 21 Outlook ................................................................................................................................................... 23 Key takeaways ........................................................................................................................................ 24 About Lee Doyle...................................................................................................................................... 25 About Gigaom Research ......................................................................................................................... 25 NFV adoption to transform telecommunications infrastructure 2 Executive summary Communications Service Providers (CSPs), including wire line, wireless, and cable providers, need to innovate to keep up with the competitive pressure of the rapidly changing network environment. As more of the value (and revenues) flow to over-the-top service providers like Google and Amazon, CSPs face the prospect of increasingly becoming providers of commodity-like transport services. At the same time, the huge growth in traffic driven by video, mobile, and cloud usage is overwhelming current networks, forcing CSPs to spend heavily in new equipment just to keep up with bandwidth demand. The answer for most leading CSPs is to improve their ability to introduce new revenue-generating services, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce their costs. A key part of this telecom transformation is for the CSPs to modify their traditional network architectures significantly to improve agility and reduce operating costs. CSPs need networks that can rapidly respond to changing traffic patterns, new applications, and user requirements. The IT market offers many lessons for the telecom industry transformation, including rapid innovation, reliance on standardized servers and operating systems, and a robust independent software (ISV) ecosystem. CSPs want to extend these benefits of IT to the carrier network to help transform the network: CSPs must modernize and transform their networks so that they can rapidly enable new revenue producing services and to profitability handle large growth in wire line and wireless traffic NFV is a key technology that enables CSPs to transform their networks so that they can deliver new services and reduce costs quickly. Service agility is key. The migration to NFV requires telecom specific virtualization software to deliver real time traffic, scale to hundreds of millions of users, and support high reliability (99.999% uptime). Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) includes many technologies that will enable CSPs to create more agile networks. NFV adoption to transform telecommunications infrastructure 3 Introducing NFV Network functions virtualization (NFV) is an initiative driven by several dozen large CSPs that dramatically increases the use of virtualization and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems in their networks. Telecom infrastructure has long been a bastion of proprietary software running on purpose- built hardware. NFV leverages IT technologies – including virtualization, standard servers, and open software – so that it can fundamentally change the way networks are built and operated. The goal is to consolidate multiple network functions on these COTS platforms and enable each function (application) to scale capacity elastically. In the fall of 2012, a number of the largest CSPs initiated an effort (in ETSI) to dramatically increase the use of virtualization and COTS technology in their telecommunications networks. A year later, a larger group of 50+ CSPs and industry suppliers introduced a number of specifications to guide NFV adoption. The key benefits that CSPs will derive from NFV implementation include: Faster time to market Enabling new services quickly Rapidly scaling resources up and down Lowering costs (both capex and opex) The challenge is to adopt IT technologies to the telecom industry requirements of high reliability, low latency, and the ability to scale to support hundreds of millions of users. SDN in the telecom network SDN provides separation of the control and data plane where the intelligence of the switch or router is split from the packet forwarding engine. This separation provides opportunities to program the network and for development of new architectures to deliver network functionality. NFV functions, such as load balancing, security, and DPI require cooperation with the data plane and can benefit significantly from a SDN programmable data plane. Service chaining is an excellent example of how NFV and SDN can NFV adoption to transform telecommunications infrastructure 4 function together; efficiently and optimally stringing together a series of services (packet inspection, encryption, etc.) for specific packet flow requirements. Role of IT hardware and software in the telecom network COTS is shorthand for industry-standard servers and storage, merchant semiconductors (e.g., Broadcom and Cavium), and standard operating systems (e.g., Linux). Advances in IT technology, including more powerful processors (e.g., Intel x86), faster switching fabrics (e.g., 40GB), and advances in network software (e.g., SDN and NFV) have brought a wealth of network functions in scope for COTS. COTS (and NFV) proponents hope to virtualize a wide range of network elements, including: Mobile core networks Deep packet inspection (DPI) Session boarder controllers (SBC) Security appliances including encryption, intrusion detection, and firewalls Server load balancers WAN acceleration Video servers NFV adoption to transform telecommunications infrastructure 5 NFV = application virtualization and consolidation (Source: ETSI) COTS is already in widespread use in telecom networks, specifically in application servers, wire line and wireless core, OSS/BSS, and CSP data centers. Network equipment providers (NEPs) and CSPs deploying COTS report significant benefits in new system design, including one-third less development time and one-third less system costs – according to research by Doyle Research. The leading providers of COTS hardware include