This week at Mobile World Congress 2018, VMware, Inc. demonstrated how the company can help communications service providers
(CSPs) create new revenue streams, open new industry opportunities,
drive down costs, and improve overall customer satisfaction by becoming
agile service providers. Through comprehensive real-world
demonstrations, VMware showed how CSPs can adopt and immediately begin
to monetize VMware's growing telco software and Cloud Services
portfolio. These offerings were on display in Hall 3, Stand 3K10.
"CSPs
require a transition to a cloud-centric virtualized infrastructure and
service delivery model that is agile, automated, open, and secure: a
move to the Telco Distributed Cloud. VMware enables CSPs to create
high-performance, agile, and open Telco Distributed Clouds leveraging
NFV and SDN technologies that deliver consistent infrastructure and
operations," said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco
NFV Group, VMware. "VMware provides an optimal infrastructure for all
telco applications and services-custom-built, packaged, virtualized,
cloud-native and SaaS - and enables CSPs to deliver those applications
securely to any endpoint across the Telco Distributed Cloud. This
includes private cloud, public cloud, branch, edge micro datacenter,
gateway, or end user."
Real-World Application of Virtualization for CSPs
CSPs
are adopting VMware solutions as the basis for their network
modernization, 5G enablement, and cloud transformation. At Mobile World
Congress, VMware demonstrated support for real-world Telco use cases
including:
- Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC)/Edge Cloud:
VMware's implementation of a MEC architecture gives CSPs a shared
infrastructure platform to support multiple low-latency fixed and mobile
use cases. The MEC architecture enables service creation, automation,
and delivery across core and edge data centers. VMware's demonstration
highlights the VMware vCloud NFV platform in a distributed, multi-data
center architecture providing full automation and orchestration of
services, such as distributed VoLTE and On-Demand Video, across virtual
machine and container-based VNFs along with comprehensive Day 2
Operations providing full operational visibility and analytics. VMware
has partnered with Affirmed Networks vEPC and Metaswitch vIMS on this
effort.
- Hybrid Telco Cloud: In partnership
with Vodafone, VMware demonstrated how CSPs can extend core network
services and applications to a hybrid telco cloud environment by
seamlessly stretching applications (IoT), core network services (EPC),
and connectivity from private core data networks to public cloud
infrastructure on VMware Cloud on AWS, empowering business continuity
and failover protection to minimize service disruption. Vodafone and
VMware showcased the creation of on-demand infrastructure capacity for
overflow scenarios such as traffic bursting, and automated VNF workload
migration between multiple distributed cloud environments in the core
data network and a public cloud, with a single pane of glass for
analytics and monitoring across the global network topology.
- IoT/Smart Cities:
VMware, in partnership with Globetouch, Affirmed Networks, and
Nightingale Security demonstrated live, real-time smart drone flight
services delivering physical premises security, HD video surveillance
and emergency rapid response services. For CSPs, supporting remote drone
missions highlights the ongoing requirements to deliver network-based
services that require ultra-high bandwidth, minimal latency
requirements, prioritization of mission critical services, and highest
levels of QoS. VMware and its partners demonstrated network slicing for
prioritization and guarantee of resources for services, along with
real-time visibility and management across multiple distributed
networks. Read "The Smartest Eye in the Sky at Mobile World Congress 2018."
- NFVI Operations Management and Service Assurance:
Focused on lowering the cost of operations and advanced troubleshooting
in Telco Distributed Cloud environments, VMware demonstrated advanced
operations for Day 0 activities such as service onboarding, service
profile definition, KPI, and dashboard configuration; Day 1 activities
such as service health and performance management, capacity planning and
reclamation, log aggregation, and anomaly detection; and Day 2
activities such as predictive maintenance, workload migration, close
loop remediation, and recommendation. Read "Considering a 5G-Ready Telco Cloud? Don't let Intelligent Operations be an afterthought."
Improving NFV Infrastructure Performance
VMware
also announced the company will be extending its networking
architecture to drive higher throughput and network performance and
utilization to deliver superior quality of experience. VMware will be
working to add DPDK-based techniques that deliver optimal data plane
network performance, dramatically reducing CPU processing requirements
while preserving all the existing benefits of VMware's NFV
infrastructure. This is designed to enable seamless deployment and
consistent high performance for data plane-intensive applications and
use cases. VMware's high-performance networking architecture will be
transparent to VNF providers, and will be able to deliver kernel-based
security, deterministic resource allocation, linear scalability, and
consistent multi-flow performance. The new networking stack will be able
to preserve differentiated features such as predictive workload
balancing, fault tolerance, live migration and high availability,
operations, and visibility. Native implementation of DPDK principles
will be able to provide greater control of network traffic while
aligning VMware networking with Intel's rapid pace of innovation in
performance and is one example of the deep collaboration between Intel
and VMware in delivery of optimized virtual network solutions. Read "VMware and Intel are collaborating to deliver High-Performance, Open and Tested Network Functions for Operators."
Partner Commentary
Affirmed Networks is the leader in virtualized mobile networks. "5G
is changing the way communications service providers build their
networks, which need to be more flexible, more scalable, more
intelligent, and less expensive to operate," said Angela Whiteford, vice
president of marketing and product management, Affirmed Networks.
"Affirmed is working with strategic technology partners such as VMware
to accelerate network transformation to a next-generation virtualized
architecture. Our partnership will be on display at Mobile World
Congress as we showcase our collaboration in delivering an integrated
solution to for Globetouch's connected car and IoT service offerings."
VMware
and Intel are working to enable cloud-optimized, 5G-ready networks with
the high performance and efficiency required to meet the needs of CSPs.
"Through ongoing technology innovation and a mutual commitment to
open source community collaborations, Intel and VMware are leaders in
today's network transformation," said Sandra Rivera, senior vice
president and general manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel.
"Next-generation virtualized networks, built on VMware vCloud NFV, Intel
Architecture, and open source technologies, can deliver the
performance, versatility, and ease-of-use required by service
providers."