Kaloom together with Linux Foundation, today announced the availability of a Virtual Central Office (VCO) 3.0 lab in Montreal. Designed for multi-vendor Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments at the distributed cloud edge, it offers a unified Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform application infrastructure for Virtual Network Functions/Cloud Native Network Functions (VNF/CNF) vendors to test their applications.

Virtual Central Office (VCO) is a solution for multi-vendor NFV deployments in the traditional telco central office and at the distributed cloud edge. The solution is designed to be used for residential, enterprise and mobile VCO services by telcos and enterprises. The VCO 3.0 initiative, currently under development, defines a cloud native multi-vendor Central Office with an initial focus on mobile services with a lab setup designed for both virtual machine based VNFs and cloud native container-based CNFs in a full 5G architecture.

Service providers are under pressure to ensure their networks efficiently deliver high throughput and avoid bottlenecks. Overcoming this challenge makes it the most critical piece for improving data center application performance. To address this demand, service providers are distributing their data centers to the network edge to lower latency and improve performance of their mission-critical applications such as Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), IoT and financial applications.

Kaloom provides a fully automated virtualized CO networking solution together with Red Hat's NFV infrastructure. Kaloom's Software Defined Fabric and Cloud Edge Fabric solutions leverage a programmable multi-Tbps fabric to increase the performance and to lower the latency for NFV application servers and storage. It also provides customers a way to program their infrastructure using the open standards-based P4 programming language to add new services quickly. The solution enhances CPU utilization for VNF applications and embeds sophisticated service chaining offload to the data plane to accelerate the overall performance and lower latency even further. Sophisticated end-to-end network slicing is supported natively in the fabric with full tenant isolation down to the hardware level for better security. Network slicing is a key innovative aspect of 5G architectures that provides customers their own virtual network slice for a better quality of experience.

"Our Cloud Edge Fabric solution was designed to address the key requirements for the cloud edge market, such as lowering latency and improving performance at a lower price. We believe that automation, unified VNF/CNF, programmability and network slicing will disrupt the way service providers deploy and manage cloud edge data centers, and we are very excited to demonstrate these capabilities with the community in the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal," said Laurent Marchand, CEO at Kaloom.

"We are very pleased to help launch the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal together with our members. This enables us to bring the open networking community closer together with multiple vendors to test VNFs and CNFs in containers for different 5G, cloud native and edge use cases, and demos" said Heather Kirksey, vice president, community and ecosystem development, the Linux Foundation.

"We are excited to participate in this community effort to create an open lab that facilitates validation of open source-based VCO solutions. The unified virtualization platform running on Lenovo industry-leading hardware showcases the delivery of different network functions isolated in containers or virtual machines and creates a pathway for customers to flexibly and efficiently migrate services to a cloud environment" said Charles Ferland, VP and GM, Networking & Communication Service Providers at Lenovo.

"Red Hat is excited to collaborate with Kaloom to bring this VCO solution to market and to extend our relationship to bring customers open software-driven networking solutions," said Chris Wright, vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat. "The addition of containers and cloud-native network functions in VCO 3.0 to support 5G networks is a significant step forward. Our companies share a commitment to upstream development and by working together in open source communities, we're aiming to deliver innovations that advance networking capabilities for Linux and containers."