If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) has the potential to dramatically change the telecommunications industry and drive increased agility and efficiency.
While the promise of a virtualized network infrastructure is great, it also has the potential to disrupt the business models of service providers and vendors that service the industry.
Rather than run from NFV, however, Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) has gotten behind the revolution and launched a program to bring together vendors and service providers in a partnership to evolve the industry, known as the CloudBand Ecosystem Program.
CloudBand is the market’s first NFV platform, according to the company, both open and multivendor while being stringent enough to accommodate the strict needs of carriers. With the CloudBand Ecosystem Program, Alcatel-Lucent is making CloudBand available to the entire industry for free in a move to foster collaboration and experimentation that will accelerate adoption of NFV.
This program will help service providers collaborate with each other and application vendors in a cloud partner ecosystem, accelerate NFV transformation through the leveraging of best-of-breed NFV vendors, and speed service deployment, according to the company.
Some of the examples of what NFV can already do for the industry include CloudBand’s virtual load balancer, authoritative domain and caching name service (DNS), firewall, and session border controller (SBC).
“In a cloud environment, a virtual network function such as a software-based virtual load balancer appliance is a basic, yet fundamental building block to integrate network services with application delivery,” noted an Alcatel-Lucent case study. “They can be rapidly provisioned on demand, when and where needed through self-service mechanisms, making them a very useful, simple and cost-effective tool to fully optimize application delivery.”
The continued rapid growth in DNS queries makes DNS another area ripe for virtualization.
“Given the critical role this infrastructure plays in ensuring customer experience and reducing churn, relying on legacy hardware with closed interfaces, poor scalability and inflexible provisioning mechanisms is no longer viable,” according to the company.
Virtual firewalls is a further area where NFV makes obvious sense, in that such firewalls can be rapidly deployed when and where needed independent of physical locations or boundaries, then stitched together with other virtual or physical network services though the network functions virtualization concept of service chaining.
A fourth example given by Alcatel-Lucent is the SBC. The SBC is well suited to cloud deployment as it can be fully virtualized and deployed on a NFV such as CloudBand.
“Cloud deployment eliminates the need for closed, customized or proprietary hardware. The common, distributed infrastructure – with centralized management and orchestration – can be shared between many similar carrier-specific applications to achieve economies of scale,” noted Alcatel-Lucent.
These and other network functions can already be virtualized with CloudBand. With the CloudBand Ecosystem Program, the list will undoubtedly get longer.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
