Red Hat and NEC Corp. will jointly develop network functions virtualization (NFV) features in OpenStack in order to deliver carrier-grade NFV solutions with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
The companies noted that they have collaborated for more than a decade on joint open source software development. In recent years, they focused on NFV system integration with OpenStack, leveraging NEC’s telecom expertise. This enables the acceleration of NFV features in OpenStack and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in order to achieve carrier-grade and carrier-scale systems, including data plane acceleration through the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Moreover, these efforts are being contributed to the upstream OpenStack community, to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to emerge as a leading cloud platform for NFV. Several of the NFV features resulting directly from this collaboration were included in the OpenStack Juno release, or are planned for the forthcoming OpenStack Kilo release.
With this new agreement, NEC’s NFV system integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform will be designed to deliver mobile packet core virtualization, also known as virtualized Evolved Packet Core, or vEPC, as well as virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE). NEC and Red Hat plan to continue the expanded collaboration to integrate and optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, along with contributions to open source communities, including OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).
