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."