Wei Bing, head of marketing for the Global Technical Service Dept at Huawei Technologies, outlines the progress of NFV developments and deployments, and how the company’s new NFV Open Lab in Xi’an will accelerate the process for everyone
Telecomasia.net: What’s the current status of NFV in terms of development and deployment?
Wei Bing: Theory discussions on NFV started in 2012 – that year, Huawei unveiled its SoftCOM strategy, and also joined OpenStack and ETSI NFV ISG. NFV development has been accelerated by great efforts from standard organizations, open source communities and POC (proof of concept) use cases. In the last two years there have been a number of POC and field trials, but only a few commercial use cases. By 2014, more than 30 POC projects with leading global operators working with Huawei were underway. That year, we also joined OPNFV, and deployed the first commercial use of VoLTE based on NFV architecture.
So what’s the next step of NFV evolution?
Commercial deployment of NFV will start this year, with larger-scale deployments expected in 2016. We expect to see widespread commercial NFV in 2017, and NFV will be a mainstream application by 2020.
NFV offers many benefits to operators, but presents challenges as well – what are some of the major ones that operators must prepare for?
There are some changes brought by NFV in terms of procurement, construction and O&M. Those changes will present new challenges, starting with the fact that the technology, products and standards are still in the early stages. New ecosystems are emerging. There are multiple integration points to contend with. Other challenges include maintaining consistency in performance and operations, skill shifts, and the need for organization and process transformation.
What is Huawei’s strategy for helping operators deal with those challenges and roll out NFV effectively?
In order to overcome the challenges and to accelerate the ICT transformation, Huawei is taking a global and strategic approach, around four major pillars:
- The alignment of Huawei’s portfolio around NFV and SDN
- Consulting and system integration
- An open and integrated ecosystem with strategic partnerships at all NFV layers, accelerating NFV development
- Standardization and technology innovation.
Thus, Huawei opened its world-class NFV Open Lab in Xi'an in January this year, with global operators and partners such as China Mobile, Linux Foundation, VMware, Red Hat and Canonical attended the launch ceremony. The lab is dedicated to developing multi-vendor integration verification capabilities, expanding joint service innovations with customers, partners, industrial organizations and open source organizations and accelerating development of the open ecosystem for NFV infrastructure, platforms and services, to aggregate values and help customers achieve business success. Huawei has invested $5 million in the initial phase, and will invest $30 million in the next phase. The second phase will be accomplished in 2017.
What are the NFV Open Lab’s goals, and how will they be accomplished?
The lab’s scope and goals include: multi-vendor NFV infrastructure integration and verification; multi-vendor NFV Services (VNFs), and E2E services integration; develop and share NFV best practices for consulting and service integration; project replication for strategic customers; provide a support platform for key OPNFV projects; and advance research for open integration and NFV deployment.
How does the NFV Open Lab assist and/or complement existing NFV efforts around the world?
The NFV Open Lab will interconnect with Huawei's global labs to share resources/capabilities and build an innovation center for network ICT transformation. The open lab will work with partners to build the open and cooperative NFV ecological chain. The open lab offers several advantages. For example, its E-lab assures a superior experience of remote access and testing anytime and anywhere through all terminals such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers.
Also, the sharing of Huawei's global labs resources enables cross-domain joint tests, leading technology studies, commercial deployments, support for digital service transformation and IT strategy implementation. Customers can gain use case experience based on actual service scenarios. And the test verification process and system is based on the NFV architecture defined by ETSI and OPNFV to ensure compliance for technologies and services.
How can telco services evolve seamlessly evolution to NFV?
Services migration needs a prime system integrator (PSI) who has rich experience with top design, and can pre-integrate and verify the equipment, systems and business from multiple vendors to guarantee high system availability. And before migration, the PSI also need to evaluate the current network, prepare a redundancy plan, and do pre-cutover and verification. All this work requires good cooperation with the operator, and the PSI need to be familiar with the operator’s current network, process, business and emergency handling program.
So for NFV transformation, how should operators choose and evaluate the capability of the PSI?
The PSI must have the capacity of top design, the ability to combine the CT business platform and IT equipment platform together, and provide services including consultant, design, planning, integration, verification etc. So since now we strongly suggest CT vendors to act as PSI, since they have the necessary experience to migrate the business smoothly to the NFV platform, minimize the impact on current subscribers, and design a flexible network. Meanwhile, CT vendors are transforming into ICT convergence vendors, so we have confidence to select them as a PSI.
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