Wind River teams with NFV software partners

As service providers explore the benefits of NFV, business CPE applications have emerged as an early use case delivering significant savings in operational costs. The virtualisation of CPE functions that were traditionally implemented as discrete physical appliances reduces OPerating EXpenses (OPEX) through more efficient utilisation of compute resources, through increased agility in the deployment of services, and through the elimination of 'truck rolls' required to update and maintain equipment at remote locations. These OPEX savings are achieved whether the virtualised BCPE functions are hosted in a server at the customer premises or in a service provider data centre.

The vBCPE reference design introduced by Wind River includes Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) from Brocade, Check Point, InfoVista and Riverbed. All these VNFs have been on-boarded to run on Titanium Server through these companies’ collaboration in the Wind River Titanium Cloud ecosystem.

“We are grateful to our VNF partners for their collaboration in developing this reference design,” said Charlie Ashton, Senior Director of Business Development, Networking Solutions, Wind River. “Together we have demonstrated that it’s possible to integrate VNFs from multiple sources into a service chain that provides the end-to-end functionality for an enterprise-class vCPE solution, running on an NFVI platform that ensures carrier grade reliability.”

“By leveraging the accelerated vSwitch in the Titanium Server platform, the Brocade 5600 virtual router will aim to deliver best-in-class virtual routing performance - the key to maximising the overall subscriber capacity of the vBCPE, and in turn, one of the keys to advancing in the New IP era of networking,” said Michael Bushong, Vice President of Product Management, Software Networking, Brocade.

“Check Point is pleased to provide market-leading network security for Wind River’s NFV solution,” said Alon Kantor, Vice President of Business Development, Check Point. “Combined with Wind River, Check Point’s advanced security – delivered as a service with innovative threat prevention technology – provides businesses’ networks and data protection from the latest malware and zero-day attacks.”

“InfoVista sees a very promising NFV service-chaining landscape,” said Ranga Thittai, Senior Director, Strategic Technical Alliances, InfoVista. “The fusion of Titanium Server NFV with our application and path control technologies allows operators to steer dynamically application SLAs and offer state-of-the-art hybrid WAN services. Thus, their customers can align application performance and user experience with their business objectives.”

“Riverbed is excited to be working with Wind River to provide the next generation of market-ready end-to-end NFV solutions,” said Katie Colbert, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances, Riverbed Technology. “With over 27,000 customers and as the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation for eight consecutive years, Riverbed is working closely with its partner and service provider ecosystem to enable software-defined networking to deliver superior application performance over any network.”

By using Titanium Server as an NFVI software foundation, the telecomss industry enjoys the best of both worlds: the rapid service deployment typically found in enterprise networks as well as the carrier grade uptime and reliability mandated by telecomss networks. Based on open standards including carrier grade Wind River Linux, real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), OpenStack and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), while incorporating optimisations for Intel architecture, Titanium Server delivers high performance and carrier grade reliability.

Brocade, Check Point, InfoVista and Riverbed are all members of the Wind River Titanium Cloud partner programme, which provides an ecosystem of optimized, interoperable standard solutions based on Titanium Server to accelerate time-to-market for service providers and telecomms equipment manufacturers deploying NFV infrastructure.