As communications service providers (CSPs) transform their businesses and modernize both their infrastructure and offerings, NFV enables them to deliver customer services more easily and quickly, with greater capacity to meet demand. NEC's NFV capabilities, integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, are designed to enable CSPs to successfully implement their modernization plans.
NEC and Red Hat have collaborated for over a decade on the joint development of open-source software. In recent years, both companies have focused their efforts on integrating NFV systems with OpenStack, leveraging NEC's extensive knowledge of telecommunications networks. This enables the acceleration of NFV features in OpenStack and Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) to achieve systems that meet the demands of operators, including data plane acceleration through the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Furthermore, these efforts are contributing to the OpenStack community, allowing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to position itself as a leading cloud platform for NFV. Several NFV features directly resulting from this collaboration were included in OpenStack Juno or are planned for the upcoming OpenStack Kilo release.
Now, Red Hat and NEC aim to deliver a secure, open, and scalable cloud platform for CSPs based on OpenStack, helping them unlock the full potential of NFV. NEC's NFV system, integrated with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, is designed to deliver virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) and Packet Network Core (vCPE). NEC and Red Hat plan to continue expanding their collaboration to integrate and optimize the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, incorporating input from the open source communities, including OpenStack and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).
