Enea, Datavision and Partners Showcase uCPE, SD-WAN Solution at MEF18

Enea® - a global supplier of NFVi software platforms and Datavision, a global service integrator of SDN/NFV-centric orchestration solutions, Kontron - Communications Business, a provider of converged infrastructure platforms and Fortinet, a market leader of Security as a Service (SecaaS) and SD-WAN solutions, have announced a partnership to demonstrate reference solutions for telco and enterprise uCPE use cases.

Datavision will showcase at the MEF18 conference – October 29 – November 2, 2018 – the culmination of work based on Enea® NFV Access NFVi software running on Kontron SYMKLOUD application-ready hardware. On top will be a Fortinet secure SD-WAN virtualized network function (VNF), managed by Cloudify NFV orchestration.

"The partnership rewards customers with an extremely lightweight NFVi platform using Enea NFV Access combined with a leading firewall and SD-WAN solution that, overall, requires minimal processor, memory and storage resources within in a condensed footprint," said Mark Abolafia, Chief Operating Officer at Datavision. "With the wide range of Kontron whitebox platforms, we can expand our client's service offerings to now include SD-WAN. When you combine this with our integration capabilities and experience with world-class Cloudify orchestration, this enables Tier2/3 service providers and enterprises to deploy a highly cost-effective SD-WAN that accelerate the monetization of NFV-based technologies."

"We work with operators to help with their infrastructure transition that better leverages SDN and NFV technologies – from the edge, PoP and cloud-ready PoPs, to the DC/CO," said Luc-Yves Pagal Vinette, Global Business Development Executive, Kontron, Communications business. "With Datavision taking the integration lead, this multi-vendor collaboration underscores the feasibility to produce reliable solutions using the proprietary and open source software on standard whitebox equipment."

"While closed SD-WAN solutions have been helping to drive innovation on the networking layer, these types of over-the-top proprietary stacks have led to yet another form of lock-in of the entire network, from HQ to branches," say Nati Shalom CTO & Founder, Cloudify. "This partnership built on a truly open, secure, pluggable, and best of breed stack from Kontron, Enea, Cloudify & Fortinet - and delivered with real world NFV & SDN implementation expertise by Datavision - will be a game changer for SD-WAN from core to edge."

Karl Mörner, VP R&D and Product Management at Enea said "We see a huge surge for cost-efficient, lightweight NFVi solutions right now. The market is turning away from "grey box vendors" in preference for pure white box uCPE solutions that can provide openness and flexibility. Together with Datavision, Cloudify, Kontron and Fortinet we offer both high value and the flexibility of an open uCPE based SD-WAN solution to Telcos and Enterprises."

Datavision is integrator with expertise in ONAP, Cloudify and OSM, and bringing the cloud closer to customer edge network with first-rate hardware and software partners that deliver greater efficiency, agility and flexibility.

Enea NFV Access is a uCPE virtualization platform for hosting and managing 3rd party VNF's and containers that runs on standard COTS hardware – from Atom to Xeon-type processors – to reduce costs while providing carrier grade throughput and reduced latency. It provides Zero Touch Provisioning, software upgrades, automation and many other features required to deploy a uCPE network. VNF Lifecycle management is done using Netconf.

The Kontron SYMKLOUD portfolio includes a series of high-density converged platforms that significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership by decreasing both rack space and power consumption. This enables a significant increase in the number of virtual services deployed per 2U rack-based platform, which houses up to 18 independent servers operated within a 1500W power consumption.

The four-party partnership with Datavision brings the best of what this rapidly growing market has to offer in terms of service and choice. Service providers can leverage the freedom of open source, standard COTS hardware, virtualized layers and tailored orchestrator solutions without neglecting their past investments vis-à-vis existing network infrastructure investments. This approach has already generated considerable interest from various forward-looking, innovative service providers who aim to deploy a differentiated service value proposition.