Kemp Technologies today introduced an operating system for NFV that supports service chaining.

The Condor OS, designed for multi-tenant managed service providers, is an application delivery controller that runs on Cisco UCS and other Intel-standard blade hardware, including HP ProLiant DL, Oracle x86, and Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers. It's optimized for enterprise applications including Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync, and Oracle software.

The software is available as a free download for service providers, which then pay licensing fees as they sign on customers to use the applications. The OS manages its own licensing, as well as licenses for third-party apps.

Condor OS is designed to provide load-balancing with security and other NFV functions service-chained. Kemp also offers plug-ins for orchestration, security checks, application health, and pinging.

Condor OS provides complete tenant isolation to ensure meeting security policy requirements, while service providers can control performance and versioning on a per-instance basis to meet the needs of individual customers, Kemp says.

Kemp is a 10-year-old company that initially focused on load balancing. It competes with F5, Citrix, Barracuda, Riverbed, and Fortinet. Those companies come from a hardware background, but Kemp has historically been a developer of load balancer software for its own purpose-built hardware in addition to third-party bare metal. "This announcement is a new iteration of the bare-metal strategy. For the first time we're departing from a pure load balancer OS," says Kemp CMO Atchison Frazer.

— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].

Want to learn more about SDN and the transport network? Check out the agenda for Light Reading's Big Telecom Event (BTE), which will take place on June 17 and 18 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers. The event combines the educational power of interactive conference sessions devised and hosted by Heavy Reading's experienced industry analysts with multi-vendor interoperability and proof-of-concept networking and application showcases. For more on the event, the topics, and the stellar service provider speaker lineup, see Telecommunication Luminaries to Discuss the Hottest Industry Trends at Light Reading's Big Telecom Event in June.