A large telecommunications company in Australia is looking to investigate NFV, Network Functions Virtualisation.
The Challenge
Network Function Virtualisation is a hot topic in the world of telecommunications, but concrete examples that add real value to the telecom network are hard to come by. A prominent network technology vendor asked Aptira to partner with them to deliver flexible framework to use in future NFV offerings of many different types.
The Aptira Solution
OpenStack is an excellent platform for managing compute and LAN resources, but it isn’t the first option that many people think of when looking to solve networking problems. In this case, Aptira saw an opportunity to combine the scale advantages of OpenStack, the flexibility of OpenStack’s orchestration engine (Heat) and the networking power of OpenDaylight to deliver an SDN/NFV implementation framework.
Aptira’s developers extended the capabilities of the OpenStack Heat project to enable it to interface with public cloud providers, the network technology vendor’s virtual router product and a carrier’s network information systems. Heat templates were then composed to automatically query the public cloud provider to obtain network details and similarly extract network configuration data from the carrier’s information systems.
OpenStack can then launch a virtual machine, install and configure the virtual router software with the information retrieved from the carrier and public cloud provider and dynamically create a virtual private link using OpenDaylight between the carrier’s customers and the public cloud provider.
The Results
The carrier’s customers are now able to order prioritised network access to the public cloud provider’s networks at the click of a button, where previously the process would require manual provisioning and take many days.
