OneAccess unveiled its service migration strategy to help Service Providers leverage virtualization technologies while taking into account their existing IT environment.
The company said its strategy emphasizes gradual NFV deployment, leveraging existing provisioning services where necessary,. New virtualized network functions (VNFs) can in effect be activated and chained to today’s legacy services. This service migration approach avoids the leap-of-faith pitfall of alternative green field approaches.
The first step of OneAccess NFV strategy is the introduction of a vCPE Adapter or virtual adapter that enables the full functions of a traditional branch-office CPE to be placed directly in the service chain of an NFV infrastructure. The vCPE Adapter enables all or part of the targeted enterprise network services to be set up using either Netconf, existing legacy protocols or a combination of both.
“Until now, operators and CSPs have been presented with two basic approaches to NFV migration,” said Pravin Mirchandani, CMO and NFV evangelist.”On the one hand, the big five networking vendors are saying ‘Trust us. We’ll get you there.’ which, in effect, is a fairly transparent invitation to consolidate into inflexible vendor lock-in, something the operators desperately want to avoid. On the other hand, various Layer 2 vendors are advocating a disruptive ‘rip and replace’ strategy, in a bid to introduce an x86 computing platform into their customers’ networks using their equipment. Neither of these approaches takes into account the need to co-exist with existing IT systems or even current upgrade plans to expand or enhance existing enterprise services.”
