Nokia is collaborating with Intel to make its carrier-grade AirFrame Data Center Solution hardware available for an Open Platform Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) Lab. The hardware will be used by the OPNFV collaborative open source community to accelerate the delivery of cloud-enabled networks and applications.
The Lab, announced by Nokia at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin, will be a critical test-bed for NFV developers and accelerates the introduction of commercial open source NFV products and services. It enables developers to test carrier-grade NFV applications for performance and availability while supporting operators' preferences for non-proprietary, high-performing, and interoperable NFV platforms.
Nokia is making its AirFrame Data Center Solution available as a public OPNFV Lab with the support of Intel, which is providing Intel Xeon processors and Intel Solid State Drives to give communications service providers the advantage of testing OPNFV projects on the latest server and storage technologies. The Lab will enable the development and continuous integration of OPNFV releases to meet the stringent requirements of carrier-ready networks.
Nokia's AirFrame Data Center is a flexible and distributed cloud architecture capable of delivering the ultra low latency and massive data processing requirements that will be required for future 5G services. Providing the OPNFV community with open access to the latest commercial server technology will enable operators to accelerate the development of 5G network architectures at the desired economies of scale.
Antti Romppanen, head of product and technology management, Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure, Nokia, said: "Nokia's AirFrame Data Center Solution is designed from the ground up to meet telco requirements, and therefore is a perfect platform for the OPNFV to test new NFV software components destined for operator cloud networks. Nokia Cloud Stack Infra for Realtime (NCIR) applications like Radio Cloud is optimized to be fully nokia.com supported in OPNFV and AirFrame on hardware and software layers. Nokia and Intel collaborated closely on the AirFrame solution and the two companies are well positioned to optimize the performance of the whole OPNFV stack."
John Healy, General Manager, Network Function Virtualization Division, Intel said: "Now, communications service providers can test their virtualized network functions on the latest servers based on Intel Xeon processors and Intel Solid State Drives in the open OPNFV lab environment. This allows for much faster testing of new capabilities and will ultimately
help accelerate NFV implementations."
Morgan Richomme, NFV Network Architect for Innovative Services, Orange Labs, OPNFV Functest PTL, said: "We welcome Nokia joining the OPNFV Pharos federation of distributed Labs. NFV interoperability testing is very challenging, so the more labs we have, the better it will be collectively for the industry.
"As Functest project team leader, I am happy to be able to run our functional testing suites on different hardware. This cutting edge lab will be very helpful to define and tune our test suites and continue working on telco cloud KPI definition. We also believe it will allow us to quickly perform multi-site tests between Nokia's AirFrame Data Center and other OPNFV Labs. The Pharos federation is a great tool we can use to improve our OPNFV reference solution."
