HP, Wind River partner to develop OpenStack solutions for NFV

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 09.25.13 — Credit: HP

Hewlett-Packard and Wind River have announced a partnership to develop cloud solutions for communication service providers.

Announced on Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit in Paris, the companies said solutions using HP Helion OpenStack technology will be developed this year. Wind River's products will be merged with HP Helion in order to create an open-source cloud platform that meets the "demanding reliability requirements" of communications service providers (CSPs), and "accelerate transition to NFV deployments," according to the firms.

The companies say that CSPs are gradually shifting towards network and application virtualization in order to reduce the operational costs of new services. However, in order to facilitate such shifts, these companies require reliable carrier grade, open standards based NFV solutions. The firms say that by merging HP Helion OpenStack with integrated Wind River products and technologies, reliability will be improved via advanced self-healing systems, carrier grade Linux and kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisors, and high availability add-ons for the OpenStack Control Plane.

In addition, the products will include carrier-grade vSwitch features for high performance networking, improved NFV workload placement -- to maximize the number of subscribers supported per server -- optimal Virtual Network Function (VNF) performance and improved security.

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Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO of Wind River commented:

"The telecom industry is 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. By partnering with a leader like HP, we're enabling a new generation of carrier grade, cloud-enabled NFV deployments for our customers in this changing market."

Both HP and Wind River expect the new solutions to lower the total cost of ownership through the adoption of commercial off-the shelf hardware, and the new products will be available in 2015.

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