The OPNFV summit 2017 saw an august gathering of developers, end-users and various communities who work towards the emerging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies.
Telecom industry is at the forefront of digital transformation with technologies like NFV gaining momentum. NFV is a technology that can replace the need of physical appliances in telecom sector. It allows multifaceted network functions – Virtualized Network Function (VNF), to be accomplished on compute nodes in datacenters.
The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) helps in its (NFV) evolution and maintains industry collaboration for consistency, interoperability and performance among various virtualized network infrastructures, with an intention to accelerate the new products and service introduction using its application.
At the event, OPNFV announced the results of a survey conducted by Heavy Reading aimed towards understanding the impact of NFV and organizations’ perceptive towards OPNFV as an accelerator of NFV transformation.
Based on the survey results, 98% of the telecom operators believe that OPNFV is successfully delivering on its promise to accelerate open source NFV.
Heather Kirksey, Director – OPNFV, said, “It’s encouraging to see validation from operators that OPNFV is on the right path, especially among those with NFV in production, and that OPNFV’s importance to the ecosystem continues to increase.”
OPNFV role is growing with nearly 54% of communication service providers(CSPs) considering it as an important part of their business strategy, this number goes up to 70% for those who have NFV in production. The survey identified DevOps playing a critical role in the overall success of NFV with 80% of telecom operators considering it essential for the success of NFV.
51 percent of the telcos have started realizing the importance of hardware based on open compute project design. 41 percent of the telecom operators believe that they should leverage existing and future technologies to meet the demanding telco workloads citing DPDK (Data Plane Developer Kit), 32 percent cited ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) for strengthening operational focus and 37 percent considered Docker platform important for optimizing applications for improving efficiency.
NFV aims to increase service agility and help in better asset utilization. The advancement of utility computing, software defined networking and open-source project framework are some of the key enablers of this technology.
OPNFV provides NFV infrastructure, APIs to other NFV elements and Virtualized Infrastructure management which collectively form the base for VNFs and Management and Network Orchestration (MANO) components.
The survey included inputs from over 98 network operators located across North-South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East who are focused towards research and development strategy, network planning and corporate management tactics.
See the full report by Heavy Reading here.
