Telco NFV - Rapidly Moving From Concept to Deployment

It's really exciting to see many of the world's leading service providers accelerating their movement towards wide scale deployment of network functions virtualization (NFV). Just last month at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, AT&T's Sorabh Saxena stated, "Our goal is to virtualize and cloud-enable 75% of our target network architecture using this software centric approach by 2020." At the same conference, Verizon announced that they have taken the next step forward in transitioning to NFV by completing an OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its data centers in the United States.

After several years of laying the preliminary groundwork in terms of architecture, standardization, and more recently proof of concept trials, operators across the globe are now solidifying deployment plans for NFV infrastructure and transitioning away from purpose-built hardware. Leading the way for service providers are virtual mobile core infrastructure applications such as vEPC and vIMS, as well as virtual content delivery and virtual customer edge applications.

In the process of moving from the concept phase to a more mature solution, many operators have found that datapath processing, such as server-based virtual switching, created a significant performance bottleneck that results in a drag on the efficient implementation of NFV infrastructure. SmartNICs that accelerate and offload vSwitch processing have been proposed as a solution to this problem, but it is critical that any SmartNIC offload is done in a transparent way that preserves software agility and innovation.

This Friday, June 3rd at 10AM Pacific Time, I'll be talking about how Netronome's Agilio SmartNIC solution solves this important problem as part of the SDxCentral Demo Friday series. I'll be joined by Patrick Jestin, SDN Strategic Product Manager at Ericsson, and we will go through a real world implementation with Ericsson's Cloud SDN infrastructure accelerated by Netronome's Agilio CX SmartNICs (read the solution brief). We will discuss specific use cases, performance metrics, and TCO savings, followed by a live performance demo. You can register for the Demo Friday webinar here. Hope to see you there!