Hewlett Packard Enterprise and China Telecom Collaborate on Open Joint NFV Lab

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), in collaboration with China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, has initiated a joint Network Function Virtualization (NFV) lab in Beijing.

The joint lab will help China Telecom, the country’s second largest telecommunications operator, plan for implementing NFV technologies and accelerate innovation of new offerings to its customers.

In order to adapt more quickly to changing customer demands and respond to emerging competitors, communications service providers (CSPs) need to rapidly deliver innovations that generate new revenue. NFV enables CSPs to develop and launch new services faster, easier and at a lower cost through the virtualization of telecommunications core networks and network functions.

The joint NFV lab will utilize the HPE OpenNFV infrastructure stack and reference architecture, as well as support from HPE NFV technical experts. The lab will enable China Telecom to test and verify the benefits of transforming from legacy networks to an NFV and software defined network (SDN) enabled infrastructure in a safe environment prior to deployment.

“CSPs need to have both the vision and the agility to respond quickly to new market opportunities,” said He Jianbo, Manager, Network Function Virtualization, China, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “NFV will deliver carrier-grade solutions that offer available and reliable network performance. This will help Chinese and global CSPs compete more effectively and deliver new services more quickly to its customers at a lower cost.”

“We believe that the integration of NFV within SDN-enabled infrastructure will be the next stage of evolution for the strategic development of the China Telecom network,” said Li Zhigang, President, China Telecom Beijing Research Institute. “We hope that our collaborative efforts with HPE will result in the creation of NFV solutions which meet our needs, and advance the transformation of our networks.”

HPE will help China Telecom test performance of virtualized functions on HPE Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade, an open cloud platform designed to meet CSPs demanding reliability requirements.

The open platform allows CSPs to avoid vendor lock-in, and leverage the virtual infrastructure manager (VIM), providing lifecycle management of virtualized network functions (VNF) instances.

Testing in the joint NFV lab will be performed in accordance with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Industry Specification Groups (ISG) using NFV infrastructure and VNF performance benchmarking tools from the Networking and Mobility Lab of HPE Labs.