THE BRAINS OF THE NEW GLOBAL NETWORK

PREPARING FOR NETWORK

FUNCTIONS VIRTUALISATIONPRACTICAL FIRST STEPS

Martin Taylor

CTO

20 April 2015

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Unmatched heritage

30 years of software development

Exceptional engineering talent

670 employees

Enfield (London), San Francisco

1000 global customers

Service providers

OEMs

Large Enterprises

Privately held

Tier 1 investors + employees

Recognized leader in NFV & SDN

E.g. AT&T Domain 2.0

Focus on IP Multimedia Comms

METASWITCH: THE BRAINS OF THE NEW GLOBAL NETWORK

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REMINDER – NFV OVERVIEW

Acknowledgement: Andy Reid, BT

WHY YOU MAY WISH TO ADOPT AN NFV STRATEGY

Lower capex

Commodity compute / switching hardware

No more end-of-life events for network appliances

Lower opex

Software-based deployment of network functions

Automated operations such as repair and scaling

Vastly simplified spares / hardware replacement process

Reduced time to market for new services

No hardware approval process

Rapid prototyping

Acceleration of innovation

Easy access to broader eco-system of innovative software vendors

BT needed interconnect SBC urgently

to get service up and running

Traditional hardware-based SBC on

3-month lead time

Metaswitch's Perimeta vSBC installed

on existing BT hardware within 3 days

and fully tested within 10 days

Full service launch 4 months later

WHO'S DEPLOYING NFV? – BT

Fixed / Mobile Convergence service for

business launched by BT in July 2014

Reduced time to market – a key benefit of NFV

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Runs on a virtualised IMS network

Project Clearwater IMS core (open source)

Virtualised SBCs – Perimeta

Service went live November 2014

Expanding geographic footprint by

deploying on public cloud services

WHO'S DEPLOYING NFV? – MAJOR EUROPEAN ISP

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Free, over-the-top mobile VoIP and

messaging service

Sufficiently low cost to support a free service

Replacement for end-of-life SBC

appliances

Can be deployed remotely on standard

hardware installed and maintained by

third parties

"It's possible to have this up and

running inside an hour"

WHO'S DEPLOYING NFV? - TELALASKA

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Virtualised SBCs in remote locations

Deployable remotely – and fast

GETTING STARTED WITH VIRTUALISATION

Your IT shop almost certainly understands virtualisation

At least 70% of x86 server workloads are virtualised

(Gartner Group, July 2014)

Your network engineers will be sceptical

"Those IT guys don't know what it means to deliver five-nines

service availability!"

You need to bring together teams that combine

virtualisation and network engineering expertise

VMWARE

By far the most widely deployed

cloud software

Built around proprietary hypervisor ESXi

Great majority of telcos already using VMware in their IT

shop

Pretty stable and offers lots of management features

Some perceive it as expensive

Pragmatic customers wanting to put NFV into production

soon should use current infrastructure ie VMware

OPENSTACK

The open source cloud solution that's attractingall the buzz

Many others exist, e.g. CloudStack but are being overlooked

Open source KVM hypervisor is de facto standard for OpenStack

Roots in NASA and Rackspace

Targeted at AWS-like public cloud services

Limited real-world production deployments

Software is still relatively immature and not very stable

Very complex and time-consuming to deploy

Challenging to manage, e.g. software upgrade

Despite these issues, expected to be long term winner

Achieving very high performance with network-intensive

workloads

IT virtualisation technologies not tuned for massive network throughput

Extracting maximum value from NFV with orchestration

Operations automation, e.g. dynamic elastic scaling

Software tools exist but need quite a bit of integration effort

Immaturity of open source cloud software

OpenStack is the future – but somewhat challenging in the present

AREAS OF GREATEST CHALLENGE WITH NFV

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Applications that don't drive massive network bandwidth

Voice, e.g. IMS, SBC, TAS generally works fine virtualised

Applications that don't require a lot of operations automation

to deliver value

E.g. voice infrastructure, services such as hosted PBX, consumer VoIP

Highly customised services such as per-enterprise service chains are

much harder

Use the virtualisation technology that you're familiar with

Probably VMware

NFV LOW-HANGING FRUIT

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No reason to delay ... NFV is a viable solution for

most new deployments of network functions

martin.taylor@metaswitch.com

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