Red Hat and NEC Collaboration will Infuse OpenStack with NFV Smarts

As 2015 begins, we're seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology. Now, Red Hat and NEC Corporation have formed a partnership to develop NFV features in he OpenStack cloud computing platform, with the goal of delivering carrier-grade solutions based on Red Hat's OpenStack build.

Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible.

"NFV  offers tremendous potential to transform the telecommunications  industry and radically change the way CSPs [communications service  providers] deliver solutions to their customers," Tim Yeaton, senior  vice president of Red Hat's Infrastructure Business Group, said.

Red Hat and NEC are longtime partners and their latest collaboration will focus on integrating NEC's NFV system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack to enable mobile packet core virtualization, or virtualised Evolved Packet Core, as well as virtual Customer Premises Equipment.

NEC and Red Hat will also contribute code back to the open source community, so that OpenStack and the Open Platform for NFV can both benefit.

In September, The Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Project, a group comprised primarily of telecom operators working across open source projects and vendors to implement NFV within their organizations. News has also steadily arrived from Red Hat about its work to drive NFV and telecommunications technology into OpenStack.  Huawei and Red Hat have also announced a new global partnership to enable OpenStack-based cloud deployments. 

According to the 2014 SDN and NFV Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey, conducted by Infonetics Research, 93 percent of telecommunications operators interviewed plan to deploy NFV as carriers work to modernize the way telecommunications networks are built and operated. 

After the OpenStack Summit in May of last year, an NFV community team formed to accelerate development around NFV-specific features.  Red Hat has also collaborated with eNovance, a leader in the open source cloud computing market, to drive NFV and telecommunications features into OpenStack.