HP Helion and Wind River to Build OpenStack-Bases NFV Solutions for Carriers

PARIS - HP has partnered with Intel subsidiary Wind River to design and sell Network Function Virtualization solutions for carriers based on OpenStack.

NFV gives telcos a way to virtualize and automate many of the functions they usually have to buy special hardware for. Virtualizing some common network management functions means having to buy less hardware, which translates in reduced cost.

“Savings that they get is tremendous,” Bill Hilf, senior vice president of product management for Helion, HP’s cloud business, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge at this week’s OpenStack summit in Paris.

Virtualizing network management also means telcos can deploy in new markets faster. Additionally, many of them want to build cloud services to open new revenue avenues for their network assets, and OpenStack provides a path to those capabilities.

The combined solutions will leverage HP’s OpenStack distribution and numerous Wind River capabilities, including its vSwitch (virtual switch) technology. Wind River also has a carrier-grade server and NFV technology called Wind River Open Virtualization, which is based on its own version of Linux.

OpenStack is a natural fit for the telco industry, which relied to a great extent on open source software. “That community of customers is very oriented around open source and Linux,” Hilf said. The affinity to open source exists primarily because of scale and cost, he explained.

They also never buy out-of-the-box solutions, and if they do, they modify them to a great extent to fit their environment.

The solution with Wind River will include Linux and open source KVM hypervisor with high-availability add-ons for OpenStack Control Plane. vSwitch will be at the core to optimize performance, utilization, and reliability. It will also provide workload scheduling and orchestration, carrier-grate security features, and open APIs.

The companies plan to have the solutions available sometime next year.