Openet Releases Weaver Free VNF Lifecycle Manager Software
By Openet is a major player in the supply of real-time business support systems (BSS) that has been investing in the furthering network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) lately. In January, the company became a member of the OPNFV Project, for example. Almost as a natural extension of this, Openet has released VNF Lifecycle Manager software. What is of particular note here is that it is completely free of charge.
This new NFV software, called Weaver, is available now for operators, system integrators and VNF/NFV vendors as a community edition.
According to Openet, Weaver was conceived in response to the fact that NFV will see the need to manage carrier grade production solutions across distributed systems at scale. These multi-vendor environments will also feature a rapid evaluation of features and functions in VNF services, leading to significant operational complexity. Weaver helps to reduce this complexity.
“Our goal with Weaver is to drive the adoption of NFV within the operator community, and since our original announcement we’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response,” said Michael O’Sullivan, GVP of Engineering for Openet. “For operators, managing multiple VNFs from different vendors using bespoke VNF managers is complex, and not in any way cost efficient. Software such as Weaver can help them successfully manage multiple VNFs at scale, avoiding potential vendor lock-in.”
Essentially, operators can put Weaver to work upgrading software and/or configurations within the existing virtual machines (VMs), rather than creating new VM instances. This is crucial for supporting efficient, in-service VNF management and it greatly reduces the operational time and complexity of virtualized network environments.
More traditional deployments that manage VNFs at the VM level only operate with coarse control and significant blind sports. Openet’s Weaver, by contrast, provides superior, fine grain control and visibility over the deployed VNFs, which results in much faster deployment that is also more robust and less prone to errors.
Edited by Peter Bernstein