The way this is progressing, Telecommunications computations are going to be running on the SAFE network itself.
SAN FRANCISCO, September 30, 2014 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the founding of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV).
OPNFV will be a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services.
“The Open Platform for NFV will bring together providers, cloud and infrastructure vendors, developers and users alike to define a new type of reference platform for the industry, integrating existing open source building blocks with new components and testing that accelerates development and deployment of NFV.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are part of the overall industry shift towards network and application virtualization.
Together they are expected to dramatically change the networking landscape, allowing providers to deliver new services to their customers more quickly while significantly reducing both operating and capital expenditures.
These technologies bring both cloud computing and Information Technology (IT) capabilities and benefits into the telecom industry, enabling new levels of flexibility and business growth opportunities for providers.
Service provider applications have different demands than most IT applications, so an open platform integrating multiple open source components and ensuring continuous testing for carrier-grade service performance is essential to this transition.
OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components.
Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.
Technical Overview
The Open Platform for the NFV Project (OPNFV) provides a reference platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
Therefore, large parts of the OPNFV architecture are directly related to the architecture outlined in the documents provided by ETSI ISG NFV. OPNFV will work in close collaboration with a number of upstream open source projects to achieve this goal.
In addition to code development, the project will address a number of integration and testing aspects.
Scope
The following diagram illustrates the scope covered by OPNFV in relation to the building blocks defined in the NFV architecture framework.
The red box highlights the components to be provided by OPNFV.
NFVI and VIM together build the infrastructure layer of the NFV framework and need to have the following reference points implemented:
Nf-Vi
Or-Vi
Vi-Vnfm
Vn-Nf
I-Ha
Nf-Vi and VI-Ha are internal to OPNFV, but these reference points will be implemented with the goal of accomplishing interoperability.
VIM needs to interact with VNFM and the Orchestrator and therefore, Vi-Vnfm and Or-Vi shall be open and come respectively with a single specification.
The OPNFV solution (NFVI + VIM) shall provide uniform, single specification northbound and southbound APIs to enable interoperability with third party solutions implementing other ETSI NFV architecture functions (e.g. VNF, PNF, VNFM, Orchestrator, Hardware, etc.).
Use Cases
Virtual network functions range from mobile deployments, where mobile gateways (e.g. SGW, PGW, etc.) and related functions (e.g. MME, HLR, PCRF, etc.) are deployed as VNFs, to deployments with “virtual” customer premise equipment (CPE), tunneling gateways (e.g. VPN gateways), firewalls or application level gateways and filters (e.g. web and email traffic filters) to test and diagnostic equipment (e.g. SLA monitoring).
These VNF deployments need to be easy to operate, scale, and evolve – independently from the type of VNF being deployed. OPNFV sets out to create a platform, which has to support a set of qualities and use-cases such as the following:
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The common mechanism for life-cycle management of VNFs, which include deployment, instantiation, configuration, start and stop, upgrade/downgrade and final decommissioning.
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The consistent mechanism for specifying and interconnecting VNFs, VNFCs and PNFs; agnostic of the physical network infrastructure, network overlays, etc., i.e., virtual link.
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The common mechanism for dynamically instantiating new VNF instances or decommissioning sufficient VNF instances to meet the current performance, scale and network bandwidth needs.
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The mechanism for detecting faults and failure in the NFVI, VIM and other components of the infrastructure and recovering from those failures.
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The mechanism for sourcing/sinking traffic from/to a physical network function to/from a virtual network function.
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NFVI as a Service for hosting different VNF instances from different vendors on the same infrastructure