OREANDA-NEWS. Huawei and Red Hat recently announced that they have completed the first phase of agilely integrating multiple vendors' MBB architectures by adopting Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. As part of this partnership, Huawei and Red Hat have successfully conducted high performance LTE tests in heavy-traffic scenarios in NFV/Software-defined networking (SDN) Open Labs in Xi'an, China, to facilitate and accelerate NFV industry development.

The industry has slowly begun to understand the necessity of NFV-based MBB network architectures in recent years, but carriers still face many challenges as they work towards NFV network evolution, such as how to ensure the consistency, reliability, and interoperability of multiple vendors' products.

Red Hat has supported Huawei's efforts to integrate Huawei FusionServer E9000, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, Huawei CloudEdge solutions (for Virtualized Unified Intelligence Controller [vUIC], virtualized Evolved Packet Core [vEPC], and virtualized Multi-Service Engine [vMSE]), as well as management and orchestration (MANO). They also tested and verified multi-vendor vertical integration, virtualized network function (VNF) integration, MANO integration, data throughput capabilities, and load balancing capabilities. The testing verifies the multi-vendor device integration and basic NFV capabilities, and provides the industry with an agile and open MBB network construction solution based on NFV and cloud technologies. Huawei and Red Hat plan to further cooperate on more NFV products in the future, including the Huawei CloudCore solutions and FusionServer F8000 servers.

"Our joint effort is critical to the rapid development of NFV," said Zhai Zhongcheng, General Manager of NFV Integration Services, Huawei. "As a leader of OpenStack and the open-source domain, Red Hat is a major contributor to development in this field. Huawei will continue to cooperate with Red Hat and other partners to promote NFV technology development. With these collaborations, we hope to conduct more tests in NFV/SDN Open Labs to provide carrier-grade NFV-based solutions, and to tackle challenges in network evolution."

Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager of OpenStack, Red Hat Inc., said, "Huawei's NFV/SDN Open Labs offer expert resources around the world, and provide customers and partners with a professional verification platform. In supporting Huawei's testing, we focused on achieving open NFV network evolution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6."

Huawei and Red Hat plan to continue to invest in engineering design, test, and certification resources, as well as cooperate with telecommunications carriers, upstream and downstream partners, and open source communities to develop technologies that support performance and functions required by NFV, to realize the vision of open digital telecommunications.

Huawei also actively cooperates with industrial organizations, such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI); open-source communities, such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight; Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV); and China Communications Standards Association (CCSA). It continuously supports industry standards evolution and new NFV technology development to facilitate the development of the industrial alliance.

As one of the nine open-source labs certified by the OPNFV standard organization, Huawei’s NFV/SDN Open Labs are dedicated to multi-vendor integration verification, joint innovation, and partner ecosystem development. The Labs flexibly construct platforms for multi-vendor integration verification in typical service scenarios, and build a knowledge base for NFV integration services based on experience accumulated in continuous integration and project practice to support carriers' network planning and decision-making with reliable data. To date, Huawei has conducted pre-verification testing for 13 carriers around the world and has begun cooperating with an additional 14 partners. Huawei also cooperates with over-the-top (OTT) partners, such as Tencent, to establish a joint innovation NFV lab to integrate and verify the quick launch of innovative services. Huawei will continue to actively cooperate with carriers, standard organizations, OTTs, and other industry partners and developers to build a win-win NFV ecosystem.