SPONSORED FEATURE
Seven things I know about…
ACHIEVING A TRULY OPEN SERVICES ENVIRONMENT
Luc-Yves Pagal Vinette, Global Business Development Manager, Kontron, Communications Business, shares what he knows about how operators can transition to “open services” using NFV infrastructure and software defined networking (SDN).
Consensus and standardisation comes from new (Open) sources The development of SDN and NFV changed the nature of the telco network ecosystem and introduced requirements for cloud infrastructure and services management that previously did not exist in telco standards. This has meant that traditional networking and telco standards bodies have struggled to drive consensus within the market to deliver solutions that can act as the foundation of SDN-NFV. OpenStack, and the different distributions of it that exist, has instead achieved consensus that it can deliver a cloud foundation that gives operators the possibility to leverage the benefits of virtualisation. In a sense we have seen the use of Open Source technology replace the previous standardisation process.
2
But Open Source must mean really Open
This of course means that Open Source must truly mean Open. There cannot be proprietary tweaks or forks that limit the upgrade path. Any iteration must by definition support continuous integration so that operators have confidence in this Open Source environment. This is one reason why Kontron commits to Canonical Ubuntu - we wanted to bring to market the first turnkey Open Source solutions that are not limited by the implementation choices of the OpenStack distribution provider, so that our customers can rest assured that they can upgrade the platform. Open must also mean that NFV infrastructure (NFVi) can support stackable Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) from any vendor. We foster an environment where any vendor can integrate software on top of the Virtual Machine (VM) and hardware. As we have no interest in being a software vendor and have no position to defend, we are not building a pre-defined ecosystem tied to the platform that cannot grow.
22 TMNQUARTERLY