Looking forward by looking back – three years of NFV deployment in the field

 

The past three years have been significant in the growth of NFV. While VMware is accomplished in bringing its developments past the proof of concept phase and into commercial deployment, the market as a whole has not had a similar success rate. But rather than dismiss these ventures as failures, the industry must take them as lessons and apply new found knowledge going forward. This was the attitude Phil Kippen, Director, SP NF Solutions and Field Engineering at VMware, suggested needs to be adopted at the inaugural Total Telecom Virtualise That! briefing.

 

Since 2013, VMware has had well over 45 deployments in the field, reaching more than 80 million global subscribers. One Service Provider in India alone runs more than 7,000 virtual machines in production deployment. While VMware is incredibly proud of these numbers and the successes they represent, Kippen believes it’s incredibly important to continue helping Service Providers push deployment scale even higher, in order to continue proving that NFV is ready for large scale deployment. 

 

“Three years ago, VMware started helping Service Provider partners use NFV to bring their products to market, including Nokia, Ericsson, Metaswitch and Mavenir,” said Kippen. “ESXi was the standard for virtualisation and the feedback we received by supporting our partners with early deployments helped VMware to build the NFVI solution we’re delivering today.”

 

Early work proved successful. VMware was able to prove significant economic value for its partners migrating from hardware to software; they focused on carrier grade expectations and provided single vendor stack deployments were possible. While performance became a hot topic, VMware’s focus was firmly on reliability and delivering production grade services.

 

“In 2013, vendors took software on their existing products and transferred them over to a virtualized platform,” continued Kippen. “From this, we learned that there were applications that were difficult to virtualise – high performance functions, for example, but we also found there were applications that were ideal for virtualisation.”

 

 

A year on and VMware has brought economic value to the service provider market with a common network function virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) platform. 

 

There was a choice to make at that time, as some vendors wanted to maintain their silos to protect their own systems – did VMware conform to what each individual vendor wanted or did it innovate and create a common platform?

 

VMware chose the latter – they focused on bringing a multi-vendor platform to market and also making multi-domain convergence a reality.

 

The logic behind this decision, said Kippen, lays in the fact that a multi-vendor platform would significantly reduce vendor lock-in, while reducing infrastructure and operational costs. VMware was also able to deploy such a system remarkably quickly due to existing VMware platform maturity.

 

The decision proved a good one and a year after the common platform was introduced, the business case for NFV looked healthy.

 

“This was an eight year project,” said Kippen. “In the first year, VMware and our partners achieved a 33 percent return on investment (ROI), which admittedly could have been better had migration happened faster at the time. By year five, we expected our ROI to surpass 50 percent.” 

 

 

It is clear that VMware is very much a supporter of OpenStack and the desire Service Providers demonstrate for open integration. The company wanted to create a platform that allowed customers to easily bolt on everything they need along the journey to NFV service delivery. It wanted to create a truly open platform.

 

Before it could achieve that, VMware had to solve a problem – it had to take what it had at the time and enhance it in a way that allowed it to work effectively for Service Provider customers.

 

2015 saw the gruelling process of VMware working hand-in-hand with customers to take developments from the laboratory into deployment. They then focused on platform innovations that helped drive Service Provider business outcomes.

 

“VMware vCloud NFV is more open than any platform before it and our close work with partners played a huge part in achieving that,” said Kippen. “Our partners do not have to consume an NFVO layer to achieve NFV services delivery, for example. We listened to exactly what they wanted and we delivered.”

 

2015 also saw VMware challenge itself to reduce time to market and it achieved that in some style at that year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

 

“We managed to bring a full, working VoLTE service to market – from deployment to first call – in less than ten minutes, live at Mobile World Congress,” continued Kippen. “We tested this by having two random audience members call each other through the network in front of the crowd. The response we had was excellent.”

 

 

Throughout the entire Total Telecom Virtualise That! briefing, reliability was an overarching theme and, undoubtedly, an area of focus for VMware over the coming year.

 

“We are constantly working to improve reliability and interoperability,” said Kippen. “We are utilising a number of cloud and network capabilities to effectively detect failures and are spending an ever-increasing amount of time looking at how we can improve service delivery, rather than just the platform itself.”

 

 

Kippen says the future is bright – he predicts that there will be aggressive growth in years to come. However, with less momentum in 2015 than 2013, due to current deployment challenges with alternative solutions, he sees the potential for market stall.  

 

“We have learned a lot between 2013 and 2016 – we can now deploy reliably and quickly, helping customers to accelerate their transition to NFV services delivery,” he said. 

 

The real, imminent challenge faced is multiple approaches to open architectures. For VMware to achieve true openness, its platforms must integrate with other open models, eliminating the need for Service Providers to completely change their deployment model when integrating new vendors. 

 

“We see the future as Open Integration, not Open Source,” explained Kippen. “Bringing new applications into operation quickly is also critical to success and cost of operations can quickly break a business case. The first step is to move to a common platform approach, where Open Integration is not only possible, it’s critical to Service Provider success.”