Huawei Unveils 'NFV Open Lab' in Xi'an, China

Huawei has launched its state-of-the-art Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) open lab in Xi’an, China, dedicated to developing multi-vendor integration verification capabilities, expanding joint service innovations with customers, partners, industrial organizations and open source organizations and accelerating development of the open eco-system for NFV infrastructure, platforms and services.

Global leading operators and partners, including China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, VMware, Red Hat, Canonical and Linux Foundation attended the launch ceremony. These efforts mark a key step to realizing Huawei's future-oriented open SoftCOM architecture.

Dr. Howard Liang, Senior Vice President and President of Global Technical Services, Huawei, said, "The NFV open lab is an open innovation center of ICT convergence dedicated to being open and collaborative, expanding joint service innovations with partners, and developing the open eco-system of NFV to aggregate values and help customers achieve business success."

With rapid development of cloud technology, user behavior has adopted five main characteristics: real-time; on-demand; all-online; DIY (Do it Yourself); and social (ROADS). In this new environment, traditional CT service architecture cannot meet user demands for a ROADS experience, meaning that operators are required to transition to ICT integrated cloud architecture. With these changes, new technologies have also emerged, the most dominant being NFV and SDN. Among its benefits, NFV allows traditional telecom networks to become more open and flexible, faster at service innovation enhancements, reduce operation & maintenance (O&M) costs, and expand the industrial chain.

However, in the process of enabling NFV, operators must overcome several challenges including ensuring multi-vendor product consistency, reliability, and interoperability, tackling integration complexity, creating an optimized NFV O&M experience, and identifying new revenue streams.

To address this, Huawei will continuously build its multi-vendor integration verification platform based on typical service scenarios, as well as accumulate experience through ongoing tests and projects to eventually build an NFV big data analysis platform. In addition to providing reliable data support for operator NFV network service planning and decision-making, Huawei will leverage the big data platform to develop joint solutions with industrial organizations, operators, and partners to obtain certifications and authorization from cross-parties, while gradually enriching the eco-system chain. Finally, Huawei, together with its partners, will continuously work to verify and enhance NFV system integration and O&M technical support capabilities.

Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of Linux Foundation, said, “As the core of the strategy, and one of the key pillars in making NFV a reality, is the Huawei NFV Open Lab. This will help Huawei working with the open source community to innovate on NFV technologies to provide use cases for multi venders’ interoperability around NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure), and VNF (Virtualized Network Functions) services." In the initial phase, Huawei is working closely with China Mobile, VMware, and Red Hat in these areas.

With an open and coordinated strategy, Huawei currently cooperates with more than 20 global leading operators on joint innovations and project verifications to accelerate NFV transformation and achieve win-win solutions. Huawei also works closely with industrial organizations, as well as the open source community such as ETSI, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV), to provide key technical contributions, code development, and integration capabilities to support the Open NFV initiative. In the upcoming year, Huawei will work with more than 50 industrial partners on in-depth joint explorations.