NFV Essentials Week in Review: Argela, NEC, OPNFV
By It was a week of new product introductions, new industry organizations and proof of concept success stories in NFV Essentials.
NEC Corp. this week was promoting its new NFV-based cloud radio access network solution. It uses Ethernet instead of CPRI to communicate between central and distributed units, which lower the amount of data exchanged.
Meanwhile, The Linux Foundation’s OPNFV Project announced that it has formed the End User Advisory Group. This new group, made up of end user organizations within and outside of OPNFV, will provide a forum through which end users can offer guidance about and help with OPNFV work.
In other news this week, Argela, a company based in Sunnyvale, California, said that it has seen success with a proof of concept addressing programmable network slicing technology for 5G networks on its M-CORD reference platform.
CORD, which stands for central office rearchitected as a data center, is a model through which the service providers formerly known as telephone companies are transforming their networks to be more like those in use at Internet giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Core components of CORD include commodity hardware, NFVI orchestration (XOS, Openstack), an Open Leaf Spine Fabric, an SDN Control Plane (ONOS), simple on-premises customer premises equipment and virtualized CPE, virtualized access (PON OLT MAC + vOLT), virtualized BNG and virtualized functions.
In other NFV news this week, GigaSpaces announced that it has hired on Michael Brenner as chief architect for network functions virtualization. He’ll lead the company’s standards effort for NFV and SDN, and will influence product strategy for Cloudify and the ARIS project.
Brenner until recently was vice chair of the Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. He’s also a former senior vice president of product strategy at ClearPath Networks. And he’s served as senior architect and director for the CloudBand business unit, among other roles, at Alcatel-Lucent.
