Virtualization

Recently, I attended OpenStack Summit in Boston with more than 5,000 other IT business leaders, cloud operators and developers from around the world. OpenStack is the leading open source software run by enterprises and public cloud providers and is increasingly being used by service providers for their NFV infrastructure. Many of the attendees are operators […]

In a previous blog, I have provided an overview of the SNAPS platform which is CableLabs’ SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack project. The key objectives for SNAPS are to make it much easier for NFV vendors to onboard their applications, provide transparent APIs for various kinds of infrastructure and reduce the complexity of integration […]

Today, twenty-three network operators published a white paper to guide the industry on priorities for NFV to deliver the industry vision for 5G systems: “Network Operator Perspectives on NFV priorities for 5G”. The network operator co-authors include Bell Canada, BT, CableLabs, CenturyLink, China Mobile, China Unicom, Colt, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, KT, NTT, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, […]

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enables telecommunications networks to be implemented in software running on high volume industry standard servers as outlined by network operators in a seminal white paper published in 2012. NFV standards have been under development in the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group since the early part of 2013. The ETSI NFV work […]

Today’s enterprise and hyper-scale cloud solutions will not deliver everything needed to virtualize the service providers’ networks. However, cloud solutions do provide many of the building blocks as a great starting point. Current Environment Service providers are evolving their networks and services to better meet customer needs and expectations. Hosted applications are continuously updated with […]

Last year I blogged about ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ETSI NFV) progress. The ETSI NFV body of work has become firmly established as the key reference for both global standards bodies and open source communities. Last week I was in Dublin for the thirteenth ETSI NFV plenary meeting (NFV#13) hosted by Cobham Wireless and […]

A CableLabs Demonstration of SDN with OpenSource Software Seeing is believing, especially with all of the hype and limitless possibilities that new technologies promise. It is refreshing to quickly build a prototype for a real customer use case without all of the smoke and mirrors. Through an open and collaborative effort, CableLabs and BSS/OSS solutions […]

Last week CableLabs hosted a ground-breaking industry workshop to encourage harmonization of Information Modeling for network function virtualization. The event was organized by the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group and brought together the leading Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and Open Source communities. Participating organizations included 3GPP, ATIS, Broadband Forum, DMTF, ETSI NFV, IETF, ITU-T SG15, […]

Today sees the first OPNFV release known as ‘Arno’ (OPNFV releases are named after rivers) which OPNFV has been busily creating since the community was launched last September. In my blog celebrating the OPNFV launch I outlined the importance of open source to stimulate innovation and accelerate progress on implementation. At CableLabs we are very […]

When ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt invited me to contribute a blog post, it brought to mind our interaction in the summer of 2012 on how to treat SDN in the seminal NFV White Paper I was then editing. The operator co-authors were keen to ensure that SDN and NFV were positioned in the paper […]