Huawei has announced the launch of its new, state-of-the-art Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) open lab in Xi’an, China, dedicated to developing multi-vendor integration verification capabilities, expanding joint service innovations with customers, partners and industrial organisations 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 and Canonical, attended the launch ceremony.
Dr Howard Liang, senior vice-president and president of Global Technical Services, Huawei, says, “The NFV open lab is an open innovation centre 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 behaviour 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 optimised 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 organisations, operators, and partners to obtain certifications and authorisation 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. In the initial phase, Huawei is working closely with China Mobile, VMware, and Red Hat in these areas.
Huawei first proposed the future-oriented telecom network architecture SoftCOM in 2012 which incorporates advanced technologies including NFV, SDN, and cloud computing. SoftCOM aims to transform the telecom industry in terms of network architecture, network functions, and business and operation models.
It will enable telecom carriers to realise comprehensive network evolution and business transformation, create and seize new value opportunities through ICT integration, and advance an open, interconnected, and innovative ecosystem to increase and better leverage aggregated industry value.
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 organisations, 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.
