UPDATED 21:51 EDT / JUNE 12 2018

INFRA

VMware announces new Network Functions Virtualization platform for edge computing

Bidding to become a major player at the heart of telecommunications infrastructure for edge computing, VMware Inc. today announced the launch of its new vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 infrastructure platform.

Aimed at network carriers, the new platform is designed to facilitate 5G and distributed computing environments within multicloud telco networks. The release comes just after the company rolled out its new VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edge platform, designed for communications service providers that wish to deploy services on OpenStack.

VMware said vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 is a larger Network-Functions Virtualization package for carriers. It comes with enterprise-grade features, including greater resiliency, failover and container networking support.

The platform also supports VMware’s NSX-T Data Center offering, which is a network virtualization and microsegmentation platform for hypervisor environments, container deployments and native workloads running in public cloud environments. Finally, and most importantly, vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 also features something called “data plane acceleration” which helps to reduce processing requirements in network edge environments.

Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE the new release was significant because Network Functions Virtualization is the name of the game for telecommunications providers these days.

“Openstack is an important aspect of NFV,” Mueller said. “VMware has the unique ability of connecting existing on premise VMware  installations with cloud-based Openstack  stack abilities, which is interesting for chief executives building next-generation applications in the Telco space.”

VMware said carriers such as Telia Co. AB and NTT Communications Corp. have been testing the new platform since January. With Telia, VMware has worked to develop an architecture plan that’s detailed in a white paper published today, which other customers can use to implement the technology.

The companies have been working to determine the best architecture to support 5G and distributed computing that takes into account every piece of the multicloud system, from the core to the network edge, Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions for VMware’s Telco NFV Group, told Light Reading.

“We believe the challenges are around how do we automate and look at common infrastructure and common policy in networking in a common overlay across private, public, edge and branch,” Di Piazza said.

VMware said Cloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 will be made generally available this August.

Image: Glenn Harper/Flickr

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