Enea of Sweden, a supplier of network software platforms, has announced the introduction of Enea NFV Access, a lightweight virtualisation platform designed for customer premise deployment at the network edge.
Enea NFV Access is optimised to provide a minimal footprint, high throughput solution for virtual network functions (VNFs) running in KVM and Docker containers. NFV Access supports both ARM and x86 white box solutions, enabling operators and service providers to address a range of price and performance points while utilising a common platform and management interfaces.
Enea’s NFV Access is designed to meet the specific requirements of enabling virtualisation on edge devices, eliminating the need for a full OpenStack deployment to provide a lightweight platform. The solution, along with VNFs, can run on as few as two cores without limiting throughput or performance, while support for container virtualisation enhances VNF density and reduces total system footprint.
In addition, NFV Access allows mixing of containers and virtual machines on the same platform, enabling both greater flexibility and offering a migration path from VMs to containers.
The key components of Enea NFV Access include virtualisation via KVM and Docker, optimised vSwitch, a full FCAPS management solution, VNF lifecycle management, service function chaining (SCF) capacity and an optimised data plane supporting 10 Gbit/s line rate from VMs and containers. The solution also features open, standards-based interfaces, making it hardware agnostic and fully portable, offering interoperability with popular VNFs.
NFV Access supports VNF lifecycle management and service function chaining via a range of northbound interfaces, including NetConf, Rest, OpenStack and Docker, which can either interface orchestration directly, or interface to a control node in a central office or point-of-presence (PoP). This functionality enables the solution to be integrated with existing networks and orchestration solutions, simplifying virtualisation of network functions at the edge.
In combination with the company’s previously announced NFV Core platform, Enea now addresses three vCPE deployment scenarios: central office and PoP via NFV Core; customer premise deployment with Enea NFV Access; and distributed scenarios by combining both platforms.
- Recently, Enea, together with China Mobile, ARM and Cavium, announced an agreement to collaborate in the China Mobile Open NFV Testlab via Enea’s OPNFV-based NFV Core platform and Cavium’s ARM-based ThunderX workload-optimised data centre server processors. The work was to include validation of NFV tests cases such as vCPE, vBRAS, vEPC and vIMS and support for Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).
- In April this year, Enea unveiled its NFV Core deployment-ready NFV software platform targeting central office virtualisation at the network edge.
