HP Engages with Wind River to Target Telecoms on NFV

HP, Wind River Partner to Create Carrier Grade HP Helion OpenStack for Network Function Virtualisation

HP has announced a partnership with Wind River to develop solutions with HP Helion OpenStack technology to enable carrier grade network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities. The addition of proven carrier grade technologies from Wind River into HP Helion OpenStack is designed to provide communications service providers (CSPs) with an open source based cloud platform that meets their demanding reliability requirements and accelerates their transition to NFV deployments.

Cloud computing is enabling the communications industry's shift towards network and application virtualization, allowing the delivery of new services to their customers more quickly with significantly reduced operating and capital costs. In order to facilitate this shift, CSPs require carrier grade, open standards based NFV solutions that are extremely reliable.

"CSPs want the benefits of cloud computing, while meeting their rigorous reliability, performance and management requirements," said Saar Gillai, senior vice president/COO, HP Cloud & general manager, NFV, HP. "HP and Wind River are collaborating to provide a fully integrated and supported HP Helion cloud solution for carrier grade NFV, enabling CSPs to leverage the agility that the over-the-top providers possess.We will also work together to enhance OpenStack technology to help ensure it evolves to meet carrier grade specifications."

For CSPs seeking cloud-enabled carrier grade NFV deployments, HP Helion OpenStack will be offered with integrated Wind River products and technologies. Key benefits of the HP Helion OpenStack-Wind River integrated solutions will include:
•Reliability - Carrier grade Linux® and kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, advanced self-healing, and high availability add-ons for OpenStack Control Plane to enable service availability levels that carriers and CSPs demand
•Performance - Carrier grade accelerated vSwitch for high performance networking, advanced NFV workload placement to maximize the number of subscribers supported per server, utilization of system topology to optimize Virtual Network Function (VNF) performance, and an availability and affinity model designed to ensure VNF service availability while providing max performance with the lowest latency
•Manageability - Scheduling and orchestration of workloads, security features to meet carrier needs, and open, standards based applications programming interfaces (APIs)

"The telecom industry is eager to tap into the vast potential of NFV. By taking advantage of a virtualized or cloud environment, service providers can easily and quickly introduce new high-value services while reducing costs. In every case, maintaining carrier grade reliability is critical," said Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO, Wind River. "By partnering with a leader like HP, we're enabling a new generation of carrier grade, cloud-enabled NFV deployments for our customers in this changing market."

"CSPs understand the value of OpenStack technology as a part of their NFV strategies -- whether that's in terms of saving costs or just avoiding lock-in," said Peter Jarich, vice president, Current Analysis. "Combining HP's deep OpenStack assets and commitment with Wind River's carrier-grade capabilities should help CSPs accelerate their journey to NFV, benefitting from the open source community approach that's been honed in the enterprise IT environment."