
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Mitch Auster, senior director of product marketing at Ciena
2014 – The year the 'Telco Cloud' starts to take shape
Over
the past several years, "The Cloud" has become so mainstream that even my parents
have heard the term and can appreciate the essence of its value. To date, the
predominant cloud services have been SaaS, PaaS and IaaS - Software-, Platform-
and Infrastructure-as-a-Service - that enable enterprise IT and consumer
applications and content to be virtualized and delivered from cloud provider
data centers. In 2014, we predict that the Telco
Cloud will emerge. This will enable the telecom services
delivery and processing functions of network service providers to be
virtualized and delivered from cloud data centers, alongside existing XaaS.
This will be a natural
evolution driven by the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) movement being
catalyzed by the ETSI NFV Industry Specifications Group1.
Currently, network operators deploy many different purpose-built appliances such
as load balancers, deep packet inspection devices, broadband access gateways
and the like, many throughout the metro network, to instantiate and manage the
delivery of wireless, broadband Internet, enterprise VPN and other network
services.
Some of these appliances are
business-oriented while others are consumer-oriented. As a result, some are
heavily utilized during the day and lightly utilized at night, while others
have the opposite activity cycle. Regardless of the situation, network service
providers must deploy sufficient capacity for each appliance type, for each
service silo and in each metro area to handle the local peak demand. Let's not
forget that truck rolls are also required throughout the device's lifecycle to
provide the necessary installation, maintenance and upgrades. The net-net is
inflexibility, high operational expense and extremely inefficient use of
capital assets.
NFV allows
the service control logic and data plane processing functions to be virtualized
and performed on common off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware servers, with each function
elastically grown and shrunk as necessary. Sound familiar? Network operators
expect the same agility, efficiency, and operational gains that cloud computing
brought to enterprise IT to be realized when delivering telecom services - in fact,
early CIMI
Corp. survey results
show that buyers expect SDN and NFV both will likely
generate a 20 percent reduction in capital costs. There is no reason that a network service
provider offering cloud services couldn't leverage a common cloud data center to
support a whole range of virtualized workloads. Since they all require physical
compute, network and/or storage resources, delivering them all from a shared
pool can provide additional economies of scale.
That will lead, perhaps
toward the end of the year, to the advent of NFV-Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(NFVIaaS) whereby those resources are not only used to deliver their own
services, but offered to third-party network service providers as well to
create a new cloud revenue stream. Why? Most service providers have enterprise
customers with some locations outside of their footprint. Purchasing NFVIaaS
from the local carrier cloud provider will allow them to address those locations
without having to maintain physical infrastructure around the globe.
The cloud has allowed
enterprises to meet ever-increasing and continually evolving application
demands without purpose-built, dedicated IT hardware. Now, the cloud,
leveraging the concepts of NFV, is poised to bring similar flexibility and
expense containment benefits, as well as new revenue opportunities, to telecom service
delivery.
1 Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); Use
Cases - ETSI GS NFV 001 V1.1.1
(2013-10)
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About the Author
Mitch
Auster participates on the ONF Market Education Committee. He is Senior
Director, Market Development for Ciena. Mitch has been in the
telecommunications industry for more than 25 years in various product
management, marketing, and business development positions and is currently
focused on cloud networking and multi-layer SDN.