OREANDA-NEWS. January 15, 2016. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced HPE Service Director, a new end-to-end service operations solution designed to help communications service providers (CSPs) manage services across hybrid networks. HPE Service Director enables automation, providing a simplified approach to managing services in network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments by bridging existing physical and new virtualized environments. This new offering expands upon HPE NFV Director’s management and orchestration (MANO) capabilities.

NFV promises significant business benefits to CSPs, where service agility can drive increased revenue by enabling new services to be launched more rapidly and at a lower cost. However, current OSS setups and the coexistence of physical and virtual infrastructure can introduce obstacles that hinder service agility, slowing time-to-market. Such inhibitors require a new approach to end-to-end service operations.

“There is a clear industry need for an end-to-end service orchestration capability that spans the NFV MANO and existing OSS silos, is model-driven and ties together fulfillment and assurance,” said Caroline Chappell, principal analyst, NFV and Cloud, Heavy Reading. “Such a capability is emerging as key to the accelerated and agile delivery of services across a hybrid physical and virtual network.”

Revolutionizing operations for hybrid networks
Providing unified operation of existing NFV orchestrators and traditional OSS assets, HPE Service Director is a natural extension to HPE’s OpenNFV portfolio. HPE Service Director features include:

  • Automation – Enabling closed-loop automation of assurance and fulfillment for unified operations
  • Shared information – Utilizing common data to help ensure quality and accuracy and “single pane of glass” management, providing a comprehensive view to improve productivity
  • Dynamic service descriptors – Providing open, flexible modeling of services, their relationships and their behavior, to drive operational agility
  • Openness – Delivering the ability to interface with third-party components, including SDN controllers and policy engines, to enable dynamic, highly personalized modes of service delivery

“There is no such thing as a greenfield NFV implementation,” said David Sliter, vice president and general manager, Communications & Media Solutions, HPE. “HPE Service Director is a transformational change in the relationship between assurance and fulfillment, allowing the OSS resource pool to be treated, automated and managed as a service. Our approach provides a more dynamic service model, enabling CSPs to bridge existing physical and new environments and dramatically improve their service agility.”

HPE Service Director joins existing HPE OpenNFV portfolio offerings, including production ready NFV platforms and orchestration solutions, a rich ecosystem of virtual network functions (VNF) partners and solutions that are pre-integrated in the HPE OpenNFV Labs, and transformation consulting and services. HPE Service Director extends the HPE OpenNFV portfolio to provide agile management of services across both NFV-enabled and traditional CSP infrastructure.

Availability
HPE Service Director 1.0 will be available worldwide in early 2016. Pre-configured solutions addressing specific use cases will be delivered as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data center to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure.