Maker of jolly expensive printer ink, HP has forged a glorious alliance with Wind River to provide customers with a network functions virtualisation (NFV) solution based on HP’s Helion OpenStack.
Products which are spawned by the new alliance will enable carrier-grade NFV capabilities.
The companies worked on the project jointly, taking the HP Helion OpenStack offering and Wind River’s carrier-grade technologies to further the already developing OpenStack NFV market. According to OpenStack-focused vendor Mirantis, telecommunications companies have been experiencing success with OpenStack-based NFV. Although still a new function, it appears that it is beginning to catch on with customers and vendors alike.
In a statement, the pair said that they wanted to create a product which allowed for the benefits of cloud computing, while meeting their rigorous reliability, performance and management requirements.
Saar Gillai, senior vice president and COO of HP Cloud and general manager for NFV at HP, in a prepared statement said the HP and Wind River project would provide a fully integrated and supported HP Helion cloud solution for carrier grade NFV.
“ We will also work together to enhance OpenStack technology to help ensure it evolves to meet carrier grade specifications,” Gillai said.
The new service will help cloud services providers compete better in a changing market. With the OpenStack NFV offering, HP and Wind River expect CSPs will be able to accelerate the transformation of their networks while also lower the total cost of ownership by adopting commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, they claim.
Carrier-grade NFV capabilities are not quite ready for customers, though. There is still some work to do to get the HP/WindRiver OpenStack NFV solution together, but the companies plan to launch in 2015.
Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO of Wind River said the telecom industry was eager to tap into the vast potential of NFV.
“By taking advantage of a virtualized or cloud environment, service providers can easily and quickly introduce new high-value services while reducing costs. In every case, maintaining carrier grade reliability is critical,” Douglas said.
