It is a well-established goal for
service providers to maximize their agility in creating services and at the
same time increase their efficiency and reduce the marginal costs of scaling. This
is true for cloud and media and mobile and residential and social networking
and the Internet of Things and, well, in every important area of service and
application innovation providers are pursuing.
With an eye on those goals, an
explosion of energy and talent has been unleashed in the past three years to
make progress on them in cloud computing and the various dimensions of network
infrastructures that need increased agility and scale. Most recently a broad
effort to define the best paths in virtualization of critical network service
functions has been put into full gear in the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
initiative under leadership of the world’s most prominent service providers and
participation by a wide array of vendors to chart the course. Progress has been
made at a torrid pace in NFV throughout 2013 and gives every indication of
continuing.
As is true in the formative
stages of most legitimate paradigm shifts, the outlines of new architectural
approaches and the best practices for pursuing them in the new solutions are
starting to emerge. The ETSI groups are starting to yield important NFV
specifications, and early stage use cases are starting to get implementation
designs from suppliers. It’s the right time for innovators to begin showing
their colors and putting new designs in play. Some of the most important areas
where innovations will start making the new services possible are in the fine
touches of intelligent traffic steering, service chaining for value added services,
and flexible combinations of modules in heavily virtualized processing pools
that will retain the behaviors advanced applications require and still achieve
the efficiency and scaling goals required to support the world’s relentless
growth in utilization.
Last week, at the Carrier Network
Virtualization conference in Palo Alto, F5 conveyed a powerful and compelling
blueprint for navigating the transitions in moving to a more virtualized
service delivery infrastructure and providing important categories of service
processing intelligence at the appropriate points in network designs. What’s
relevant about the blueprint is not that individual solution components would
be virtualized as required in the appropriate VM pools—those are table stakes
in the process. The special ingredients in the F5 blueprint are the breadth of functionality
and mix of deployment points articulated as addressable by its portfolio; the
appropriateness of fit at each point for the capabilities required; and the
attention to steps in the evolution cycle that make pragmatic sense in each targeted
service area for the journey to virtualization to yield results.
For example, a path for
transitioning the Internet to mobile integration point so important in mobile
operator networks (the SGi interface) into a flexible, modular and scalable
combination logic pools for data plane, control plane, and value-add services processing
that can each be virtualized at their own pace, remain consistent with the architectural
requirements of 3G/4G, and add value
to the applications being provided was clearly outlined. In parallel and at a
different point in the service delivery topology, a similar blueprint for incorporating
intelligent service processing functions in the appropriate contexts in cloud
data center sites was described. In this case, modular versions of firewall,
load balancer, NAT, and other functions are deployable in the context of whole applications
being offered to wide subscriber bases (such as media delivery or rich
communication services) or through use of virtual editions of similar modules,
in individual tenant computing segments for their particular needs.
Examples could continue. The
point is, at a time when the need for clear articulation of practical paths to
achieving network virtualization is poignant, one set of blueprints for
navigating that transition is being articulated by F5 with the especially appealing
attribute of being manageable and targeted at the right functional goals.
Will F5’s integration with key
orchestration and SDN suppliers be effective? Will integrations with ecosystem
partners for revenue services such as mobile IP and residential media delivery
be successful? These are important execution questions that remain to be determined.
However, before those questions can even be asked, the compelling vision for
how to approach the transition and achieve the economic and functionality goals
the journey to virtualization is calling for has to be in place. For F5’s purposes,
it is.
For more information about ACG's NfV services or SDN services, contact sales@acgresearch.net.
