The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced a strategic partnership agreement to further the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) specifications. A formal agreement was approved at this week’s ETSI General Assembly meeting in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France.
ETSI and ONF have maintained a strong working relationship since ETSI’s unveiling of the NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) in 2012. The NFV architecture is supported by SDN and benefits from ONF’s work with the OpenFlow protocol. Together, the organizations will explore how SDN can enable forwarding-plane support for some of the most important NFV use cases. In particular, our two organizations will collaborate on the means to build dynamic, programmable Virtualized Network Function (VNF) forwarding graphs. ETSI’s NFV ISG has launched a call for NFV Proofs of Concept (PoC) and published a PoC framework. ETSI is now keen to see PoCs that employ both NFV and SDN and showcase the benefits of both technologies.
“ETSI is focused on addressing the problems that telecommunications networks face today by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage,” said Luis Jorge Romero, director-general of ETSI. “This collaboration with ONF allows us to both significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, and serve as a relevant source for requirements and use cases for the SDN community.”
In addition, ONF released an “OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV” solution brief that discusses the network challenges that operators will need to overcome to implement NFV, and presents use cases that demonstrate how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can meet the need for automated, open, and programmable network connectivity to support NFV. The NFV solution brief will provide insight into how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can accelerate NFV deployments by offering a scalable, elastic, and on-demand architecture well suited to the dynamic NFV communications requirements for both virtual and physical networking infrastructures.
