Red Hat and NEC announce that they are going to collectively work on developing network function virtualization (NFV) features in OpenStack which will drive efficiency for communication service providers. The collaboration focuses on making Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform – an IaaS platform – as the cloud platform of choice for NFV.

Communication service providers (CSPs) have perennially faced business and operational challenges including peak traffic load, applications and services, growing user base, network infrastructure costs, and more. Areas such as network management, customer service, engineering as well as service delivery have been very complicated and time consuming pushing the entire communication ecosystem into lethargy.

NFV, the innovative solution, is the new equipment architecture designed to address these challenges. SDN on the other hand has emerged as the innovative network architecture. Time to market is smartly addressed as new services can be rolled out without adding a battery of new expensive hardware. Just running an array of virtual machines and integrating them with policies will deliver the required service. SDN simplifies complex workflows for activation and management of services.

NEC is a seasoned IT and network technologies solutions provider which has developed SDN/NFV solutions as commercial offerings. Together with Red Hat, the collaboration is looking forward to develop an open industry standard boosting greater adoption of NFV. CSPs can expect to have an OpenStack based reliable, open, and scalable cloud platform to redefine their operational modalities.

Technology concepts such as mobile packet core virtualization (also called virtualized Evolved Packet Core or vEPC) and virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) will be in focus in this collaboration. Contributions to integrate and optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux Platform and NFV as well as contributions to open source communities are also on the cards.