 | Issue: | EMEA 2014 |
| Article no.: | 12 | |
| Topic: | NFV: The magic happens on the outer limits | |
| Author: | Pravin Mirchandani | |
| Title: | CMO | |
| Organisation: | OneAccess | |
| PDF size: | 357KB |
About author
Pravin Mirchandani joined OneAccess as Chief Marketing Officer in May 2011. A graduate of both the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, with more than 20 years experience in the Telecoms industry, Pravin has held key roles in Marketing, Product Development and Sales at major telecom equipment manufacturers and software vendors such as Bay Networks, Nortel, Orchestream and Codima Technologies. Most recently, Pravin was CEO at Syphan Technologies UK, an innovative organisation providing security services to Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Pravin has excellent experience of working in France and is fluent in English, French and German.
Article abstract
SDN/NFV represent both an opportunity and challenge for CSPs. Its promise of agility, flexibility and reduced costs are highly attractive but implementing SDN/NFV across their current silo-based organization, and changing well-established business practices, will be a non-trivial and lengthy set of people-oriented tasks to navigate. CSPs are also looking to vendors to progress beyond architectural and vision statements and show them some real use-cases for this new technology.
Full Article
It’s not uncommon to hear racing drivers, mountaineers and other proponents of extreme sports talk of being ‘most alive when operating on the limit’. It is here, they say, at the boundary between the possible and impossible, that something magical happens. Spatial awareness and environmental oversight is sharpened. The interface between the athlete and their machinery vanishes and the two perform together as a single entity, each a natural extension of the other. The achievement of the goal, be that a new lap record or a final stage ascent, becomes the single and all consuming focus of attention. That focus optimizes their performance and, as a result, enables the remarkable to be achieved.
Sound familiar? It should. Virtualization, in particular Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), draws a number of parallels. NFV strives to achieve a higher state of network ‘consciousness’, where a new level of performance visibility can be obtained and utilized to increase the network’s functionality and its ability to deliver managed services. A state where the network’s management software is so harmonized with its various hardware components that they combine to form a single entity that is more powerful and more versatile than either element could hope to be alone.
The goal behind NFV is to combine a number of network functions located on specific devices onto one x86 server or server chassis and then to use a ‘hypervisor’ software layer to ‘spin up’ a number of virtual machines that each host a single network function. The devices often cited for this treatment include switches, load balancers, firewalls, media servers, servers and, importantly for our extreme sports metaphor, routers.
Why concentrate on routers? Because unlike the other devices, only part of the router is ever likely to be virtualized, meaning that in the router we have found, from a hardware perspective, ‘the outer limits’ of network virtualization. And it is also here, in the network access routers that CSPs install onsite with their customers, right on the edge of the network, where something transformational for telco operators and CSPs can happen.
There are three key reasons why the router’s hardware is likely to resist virtualization. The first relates to price vs performance: the x86 architecture is a general-purpose computing environment and does not deliver the optimized performance needed for the volume packet handling and low-latency requirements of routers. Service providers are therefore highly unlikely to agree to the significant price premium required to achieve the same performance levels.
Secondly, in the CSP and enterprise customer’s environment, there are too many access link combinations required to enable the physical hardware to be done away with any time soon. Servers, storage and other network components typically require only an inbound and an outbound Ethernet port to operate making them ripe for delivery in an x86 environment. The common router access ports of ADSL, VDSL, S.HDSL, among others, plus cellular modules and antennas for radio access (frequently used for backup), together with SFP ports to support different fiber speeds and optical standards, are not readily available in an x86 environment, or only at significant cost, since they would require specialized plug-in interface cards, which would, in a sense, defeat the point of virtualization in the first place.
Finally, many routers still need to support classical TDM telephony interfaces such as ISDN and analog ports in order to attach legacy fax and alarm systems. For the same reasons as above these specialized interfaces cannot be integrated into an x86 environment.
In addition, many network functions are focused on customer experience management or security and therefore need to be located near to the customer, e.g. WAN optimization, VPN encryption, application performance management. Although these can be x86 based it makes much more sense to locate them on the router particularly where multiple WAN links are being managed.
The OneAccess view is that the customer premises router will not be integrated into an x86 environment any time soon and that the move to multiple, frequently heterogeneous access interfaces, to ensure service continuity in a world dependent on Cloud computing, makes it even more unlikely.
But from a software function perspective things look a lot different. Software modules that deliver network functions can be virtualized. Indeed for telco operators and CSPs, ‘the magic’ to which our mountaineers refer, lies in using NFV to transform the router into a virtualized service platform capable of delivering a set of network functions such as Internet access, voice connectivity and monitoring, voice transport, secure transport, backup, optimization and so on as an integrated bundle to their enterprise customers. This way, the operator or CSP can utilize what will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be an indispensable hardware component to easily and cost-effectively deliver virtualized managed services to their enterprise customers.
As businesses, operators and CSPs continue to migrate to a virtualized, all-IP environment, the innovative use of the network infrastructure is becoming a fierce battleground for competitive advantage. With increasing choices for core communications requirements such as telephony and business application services readily available from specialist third party providers in the Cloud, the CSP’s network is now in danger of becoming regarded as just another basic utility, alongside the mains power and water services that any organization needs to function. The challenge for operators and CSPs is to find ways to use the network to generate new revenue streams that can compensate for ARPU decreases by offering innovative new services, thus fighting back against the over-the-top players that are increasingly stealing food from their plates.
If operators can heighten the versatility, performance and security of their customers’ networks via managed services which, for example, enhance network management, increase critical application performance, or support a step-by-step migration to a fully virtualized SDN/NFV environment, they can create these new revenues and strengthen their position in the market to boot.
SDN, and NFV functionality in particular provides the prospect of enabling service providers to add new features or switch existing services on and off in alignment with customers’ changing needs without having to install new network edge devices or change the customer premises equipment. When combined with the ability to remotely manage and provision unlimited numbers of individual routers from a central office location the full game-changer power and potential for this new proposition starts to become clear.
SDN/NFV however represents both opportunity and challenge for CSPs. Its promise of agility, flexibility and reduced costs are highly attractive but implementing SDN/NFV across their current silo-based organization and changing well-established business practices will be a non-trivial and lengthy set of people-oriented tasks to navigate. CSPs are also looking to vendors to progress beyond architectural and vision statements and show them some real use-cases for this new technology. Despite this, however, many will take comfort in the knowledge that a gradual migration to an NFV environment can be easily achieved and without disruption to their existing network equipment upgrade paths. So when the time comes for operators and CSPs to replace the equipment that ‘operates on the limits’ of their networks, NFV, with all the transformational service delivery opportunities, TCO reductions and market differentiating network performance enhancements it promises to bring, will suddenly be within their grasp.
