Promotion of network functions virtualization (NFV) for cloud environments is the focus of a new global partnership between Huawei and Red Hat. The companies are working together to foster OpenStack-based cloud deployments and accelerate collaboration and development efforts for communication service providers (CSPs).
OpenStack is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for NFV workloads and cloud deployments, and Red Hat and Huawei are both big proponents. The companies plan to cooperatively engineer carrier-grade cloud solutions for CSPs as part of their partnership deal, combining Huawei’s telecom expertise with RedHat’s OpenStack development experience.
Recent research from Infonetics shows that an overwhelming 93 percent of telecom operators plan to deploy NFV to update their telecom networks, making OpenStack a logical fit for this market segment. The new partnership has Red Hat integrating its Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with Huawei’s FusionSphere Cloud OS at the management layer. This creates a unified, open and production-ready cloud solution to support NFV for telecom carriers and service providers. The companies will also work together on engineering, upstream contributions and product marketing efforts as well as promoting adoption of OpenStack for NFV efforts in the CSP space.
"Through open collaboration with partners like Red Hat, Huawei aims to support the business reform and transformation of the telecom industry,” said Ren Zhipeng, president of Huawei's Cloud Computing Product Line. “This partnership will focus on NFV and the development of joint solutions to foster an open, interconnected and innovative ecosystem that supports the entire OpenStack community."
"Carriers and telecommunications service providers are under pressure to modernize their network infrastructure to meet demands created by new service offerings and the explosive volume of data crossing the network,” added Tim Yeaton, senior vice president, Infrastructure Business, Red Hat. “As a result, many are exploring the benefits OpenStack-based clouds can bring to NFV projects.”
Indeed, there has been quite a flurry of activity surrounding OpenStack over the last few months. Platform player Siaras achieved a successful proof of concept with customers of cloud provider KVH last month. The project had users spinning up workloads in multiple but dissimilar data centers using a single cloud and WAN orchestration interface with Siara’s cloudscape platform federating deployments.
And OpenStack B2B software provider Mirantis brought in a record $100 million in Series B funding in October, the largest ever investment of its kind in support of an open source solution. The new funds are being used for engineering and development as well as to expand the company’s presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Want to hear more benefits and opportunities that Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offer? Software Telco Congress, held January 28-30, 2015, at The Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
