Vendors produced a plethora of tools designed to help service providers improve network agility through virtualization.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

May 13, 2016

14 Min Read
Leading Lights 2016 Finalists: Most Innovative NFV Product Strategy (Vendor)

Vendors are taking on the market with network functions virtualization (NFV) products designed to combine flexibility with the reliability and performance service providers need.

NFV promises to provide agility and freedom from vendor lock-in, combined with the robustness that service providers have grown accustomed to from purpose-built hardware. Using NFV, service providers can spin up new services quickly, offer try-before-you-buy service, and achieve other benefits that were previously impossible.

We saw a crowded field of entries in the Leading Lights category of Most Innovative NFV Product Strategy (Vendor). We narrowed the competition to a less crowded -- but still numerous -- line-up of ten finalists.

The Leading Lights 2016 winners and newest class of Hall of Fame inductees will be unveiled at the Leading Lights awards dinner, which will be held the evening of Monday, May 23, at the Hotel Ella in Austin, Texas. For more details, see this Leading Lights 2016 awards dinner page. The following day, the Big Communications Event 2016 opens its doors for two days of networking and learning.

Here are the finalists in this category:

ADVA
ADVA Optical Networking is focused on developing high-performance hardware appliances, using NFV to ensure its FSP 150 ProVM works with open software and hardware solutions from other vendors. ADVA launched its NFV strategy last year, announcing its first commercial product in October and acquiring Overture in January, combining Overture's Ensemble software suite with ADVA Optical Networking hardware. ADVA's Ensemble NFV is designed to allow service providers to innovate quickly, explore experimental service offerings and create try-before-you-buy programs, hosting virtualized functions on any commercially available servers.

Find out more about network functions virtualization on Light Reading's NFV Channel.

ADVA Ensemble NFV is currently deployed by Masergy Communications Inc. and DartPoints at the customer edge, and is involved in trials to virtualize brownfield environments without affecting the existing network, providing immediate virtualization requiring no change or risk to the existing service delivery network.

Amdocs
Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) is focused on service agility, accelerating the service lifecycle from design to fulfillment, assurance and monetization. Automated design, test and launch of complex multivendor next-generation services cuts service innovation times by months to just eight weeks or less, empowering service providers to achieve rapid, low-cost innovation more typical of OTT providers, Amdocs says.

Amdocs has completed more than 20 advanced NFV PoCs with Tier 1 operators, and partners with 30 other suppliers. Amdocs' strategy of openness allows operators to onboard any virtual network function from any vendor, supporting service agility and avoiding the challenges of vendor lock-in.

Next page: Drawing Board to Customer Trials in Less Than 9 Months

Casa Systems
Casa Systems Inc. went from the drawing board to customer lab trials and product launch in less than nine months with its Axyom ultra-broadband edge platform. This robust platform utilizes NFV 2.0, with network functions optimized to dynamically scale in the multiple dimensions required by service providers, Casa says.

Axyom is a cost-effective product for service providers who need powerful mobile edge computing in a 1RU form factor and are seeking direct monetization of their investment, Casa says. For example, Axyom, coupled with low-power small cells, enables service providers to offer location insight services to their enterprise customers.

Service providers are also interested in Axyom as a standalone security gateway which can secure all access types at the edge, saving backhaul costs and improving QoE, Casa says.

Casa expects Axyom to be in commercial deployment with at least nine customers by the end of Q3 2016, and more by year-end.

Cisco Systems
The Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) NFV infrastructure is a fully open ETSI compliant pre-integrated solution including all physical and virtual compute, network, and storage hardware and necessary storage. The infrastructure provides management and operations software tools to simplify installation and operation for service providers, with carrier-grade high availability, reliability, and predictable performance for high level customer SLAs, Cisco says.

Cisco's NFV Infrastructure provides tested and certified packaging, with high performance and scalability, high availability, single-interface management, automated Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) OpenStack deployment, reduced TCO, and faster time to NFV network services, Cisco says.

CENX
CENX Inc. 's NFV strategy is to provide service providers with end-to-end orchestrated service assurance and management for their networks, through its flagship software product Exanova Service Intelligence, which leverages large-scale real-time network analytics to drive increased service agility and quality over NFV and hybrid network infrastructure, CENX says.

Exanova Service Intelligence provides Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) by harnessing network big data for real-time analytics, to inform intelligent service assurance and capacity planning. Exanova applies the power of big data analytics, automation and leading-edge web technologies to consolidate, correlate, analyze and visualize KPIs within a single "pane of glass" and to drive actions, CENX says.

The business case for CENX's NFV strategy centers around three value propositions for mobile, wireline and cloud data center service providers: increased service agility, higher quality assurance of services and reduced opex, CENX says.

Exanova is deployed at Tier 1 service providers in North America, Europe and Asia, including PCCW Global, Ericsson Managed Services, CoreSite, and two of the top four US mobile operators. CENX says its strategy of NFV service assurance has resulted in these benefits for real-world hybrid networks:

  • - increased inventory accuracy by 70%+ by eliminating error-prone manual processes;
    - decreased fault triage time by 75%+ through real-time analytics of performance and utilization measurements;
    - increased service turn-up success, reducing failed circuit turn-ups on first attempt from 85% to 15%;
    - reduction of service ordering intervals from weeks to minutes with customer self-serve portal automation.

Next page: NFV Optimizes the RAN

CommScope
Cloud/centralized radio access network (C-RAN) enables NFV concepts to be applied to software running in the RAN by centralizing the baseband processing -- the core function that allocates spectrum resources among users within a cell. C-RAN architecture also provides an opportunity to go beyond NFV for baseband processing to virtualizing the actual radio resources. Cell virtualization extends the concept of virtualization beyond small cell hardware and onto the airwaves. C-RAN-enabled cell virtualization gives operators the ability to re-use spectrum many times over within the footprint of a single cell. The result is the elimination of inter-cell interference while providing high capacity. Cell virtualization enables more dynamic and efficient use of a scarce and costly resource: spectrum. Considering operators have spent $107 billion on spectrum purchases in the last three years, cell virtualization can help operators leverage their investments by dramatically improving spectral efficiency, CommScope Inc. says.

To serve large, densely populated venues such as high-rise office buildings, coliseums and airports, networks consisting of multiple small cells can be deployed throughout the area being served. This approach increases coverage area and capacity, but at a cost. Multiple cells create cell borders, creating interference and forcing handovers for users near the borders. In traditional small cell networks, border interference can occur across as much as 50% of the covered area. Data rates plummet, call drops increase and even battery life suffers, CommScope says.

In a C-RAN, multiple virtual cells can be created within a single physical cell. Capacity is centrally pooled across all the access points, so the system can dynamically allocate it to users wherever they are within the coverage area. There is no need to over-provision each sector, reducing the system equipment cost. Carriers can also re-use the same spectrum many times over, within the footprint of a single physical cell, CommScope says.

The Smart Reuse feature of CommScope's OneCell Cloud-RAN Small Cell Solution is the embodiment of the cell virtualization concept, the company says. As of Q2 2016, the Smart Reuse feature of OneCell is in mobile network operator trials.

Juniper Networks
Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR)'s product strategy is to drive NFV adoption with service providers by providing an open, standards-based, service-aware Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) solution with the performance, security, scalability and flexibility to run inside the mobile RAN. The solution allows end-user applications to achieve high bandwidth with ultra-low latency by enabling service providers to deploy services closer to the edge network using an NFV-based cloud computing environment in the mobile RAN.

Next page: Optimized for X86

Juniper's MEC strategy includes a joint solution with Saguna Networks to provide various economic benefits that strengthen the business case for early MEC deployments including opening the MEC market to new players including OTT providers and web application developers; simplifying MEC trials and testing of different deployment strategies, thereby reducing time-to-market and investment; and enabling new revenue-generating services for content delivery, IoT, retail and enterprise applications.

Nokia
Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)'s goal is to deliver an industry-leading set of IP routing and mobile gateway VNFs which support a wide range of network deployment use cases with high performance, scalability, resiliency and open manageability. To this end, Nokia (formerly Alcatel-Lucent) is delivering a portfolio of IP routing and packet core VNFs for x86-based server architecture.

Nokia's IP routing and mobile gateway VNFs have been designed to optimally utilize hypervisor (host) resources; deliver high performance for both control (routing) and data plane functions (packet forwarding) with services enabled at scale; allow for functional separation and redundancy of control plane and data plane VMs; allow for elastic-cloud scaling (horizontal and vertical scaling); and provide superior lifecycle management (LCM), service orchestration and operations and maintenance capabilities across physical and virtualized network elements, Nokia says.

Nokia's virtualized router and mobile gateway applications are delivered from the Nokia Virtualized Service Router (VSR) and the Nokia Virtualized Mobile Gateway (VMG).

VNFs can be deployed as integrated systems, with single virtual machine (VM) for control, data path and other functions, or as distributed systems, with separate VMs and independent scaling as needed. VNFs use virtual Forwarding Path (vFP), an x86-optimized forwarding path which supports data path functions and high-performance packet processing functions, including integrated value added services functions (Application Assurance). The VNFs implement Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), a multi-threaded software approach whereby different processes can be scheduled and run concurrently on different CPU cores for increased scale and performance. They use a 64-bit OS to enable access to more memory for increased routing and services scalability. And they use open platforms and partnering with Intel to optimize the interaction of VNFs with the underlying server and input/output hardware (I/O), including storage, using tools such as the Intel DPDK and SR-IOV to help drive the highest possible data plane performance in x86 environments.

The VSR picked up 13 new customers added in 4Q15, bringing the total to 44 deployments for VSR Route-Reflector and simulator applications. Additionally there are more than 90 VSR proof of concept tests underway or completed. On the VMG side, several Tier 1 and Tier 2/3 mobile operators are in the process of commercially deploying the VMG for a variety of applications, including IoT, WiFi access, and LTE consumer mobile broadband. In addition, mobile operators continue to evaluate and test the VMG with more than 20 trials and PoC tests either ongoing or being scheduled in the 1H-2016, Nokia says.

Next page: Optimized Cloud for SMBs

OneAccess Networks
OneAccess 's NFV strategy is designed to enable delivery of cloud and other managed services to SMB and enterprise customers globally. Operators say they want compact, efficient, carrier-grade VNFs delivered on an open, standards-based platform that allows them to stay in control. They want to integrate third-party VNFs as they see fit. Plus they need a phased approach to migration, at a pace they define. OneAccess's NFV strategy is designed to answer these demands, the company says.

OneAccess has evolved a range of scalable, carrier-grade VNFs which mitigate vendor lock-in by using industry-standard APIs, along with white box CPEs that run its and other vendors' VNFs, where both the platform and the VNFs can be directly integrated into the operator's systems using NETCONF and YANG.

OneAccess's NFV catalog includes a fully-featured vRouter and VNFs for a Session Border Controller, WAN Optimization Controller, VPN and Hybrid WAN. All OneAccess' VNFs can be run in a virtualized data center, as well as on its own or others' white boxes, and in combination with other vendors' VNFs.

OneAccess has reached the final stages of POC trials and been shortlisted with two major operators in North America and Europe and are at intermediate stages with several other CSPs and partners.

Versa Networks
Versa Networks claims its NFV-based software is able to reduce the TCO of managed network and security services by up to 80%, while accelerating provisioning times from months to hours. Instead of deploying multiple proprietary hardware devices and software packages at the branch, along with associated management portals and support expenses, providers deploy a single instance of Versa FlexVNF software on commodity x86 appliances or servers to provide a wide set of virtualized networking and security functions (VNFs) that seamlessly work together via service chaining. Versa FlexVNF, Director and Analytics are designed from the ground up with multi-tenancy and elasticity to provide economies of scale and radically improved agility (e.g. scaling branch WAN or firewall capacity with a few clicks). The result is much lower capex/opex, along with much faster time-to-service and simpler ongoing management, Versa says.

Versa provides a comprehensive VNF platform, allowing a broad set of use cases and deployment scenarios -- not just the rapidly emerging software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) market, but also virtualized CPE (vCPE) and branch security. Its list of VNFs includes full carrier-grade routing (BGP) and other network functions, and a full set of security capabilities from NG firewall and UTM to web gateway and DNS. And Versa can replace the physical branch router if desired.

Versa's solution was built for major SPs, and has been selected for over 40 PoCs at Tier 1/2 providers and large enterprises, commercially deployed in 6+ provider networks, with a public reference from a Top 10 provider, Orange (NYSE: FTE).

— Mitch Wagner, Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading.

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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