Peta Room

Recently I was leading the acceleration technics from virtualization point of view and how they can satisfy the “ need for speed ” requested by data intensive VNFs. Although virtualization brings flexibility, resource management and scalability, it adds an overhead of resource represented by the amount of dedicated resource to run an hypervisor. Virtualization introduce also the OVS component: Open virtual switch. This component is responsible of network bridging and routing in the virtualization domain. Historically, Openstack framework was built for IT and web application. Then it was adapted by Telecom vendor as the Telco cloud framework to implement the NFV shift in the telecom industry. OVS component is not a carrier grade component and represents a bottleneck point for data intensive VNFs. Understanding the Data path in a virtualization environment. Referring to VMWare technology, the below figure represents the data path in a virtualization environment. ...

vEPC or virtual Evolved Packet Core is the most important platform in the telecom operator architecture. EPC is the core network of LTE system and responsible of handling the payload efficiently from performance and costs perspective. Modern EPC architecture platforms separate the user plan from the control plane in order to make the scaling independent. Thanks to this architectural split, the operators can dimension and adapt their network easily. Many operators have started virtualizing some not data intensive applications (IMS,TAS, PCRF, ..) and are looking today to continue the virtualization effort across the data core functions. Here is the list of some common functions that are becoming candidates for virtualization within the packet core: ·        Packet Data Serving Node Gateway (PGW) ·        Serving Gateway (SGW) ·        Mobile Mangement Entity (MME) · ...

During our NFV transformation project within a global Telco Group in the region, we got the chance to lunch a big RFP(Request for proposal) to select the right list of vendors to help us during this journey. We have defined a target strategy and set a clear roadmap for the different project millstones. The project was divided on many phases, one of the big phase was about transform the underlying infrastructure footprint that will hosts the NFV,IT and public cloud workload. The infrastructure phase was about select the right vendors for several domains. Below are the list of covered domains at that time:           Compute domain           Storage domain           Datacenter Network domain           Hypervisor domain           Storage virtualization domain           Software defined network SDN       ...

During my few years with technology telecommunication industry, I was involved and responsible for the technology trends evaluation. Through this process, Telecommunication operators can  follow technology refresh and trends for many domains. It was really challenging for me and my team to follow the trends for many domains: Cloud computing, infrastructure across different fields including computing, storage, networks, SDn openstack, big Data, etc.. We didn’t have enough time to write a fair document that allows us evaluating vendors against their solutions and bids. Commercial and technical evaluation need to be done each time we lunch a new RFP(Request of proposal). We spent days and nights writing, defining and setting the right requirements per domains as agnostic as possible against each vendors approach. At the same time we were very stressed by time and we should delivery as fast as possible to give the vendors the time to look for our requirements and invo...

A business case of NFV includes by default all the benefits coming up within virtualization. Virtualization improves  the cost spent on different hardware types by unify infrastructure layer and separates applications and OS layer form hardware layer. This change have bring a lot of saving  to CAPEX and also to OPEX area. Today, most of IT applications ,and even mission critical application, are running on top of virtualization platforms. Operators have already started a stage of application migration and database consolidation to run on virtualization environment. A lot of saving was observed from license model, hardware utilization, and no more skills are needed to manage these different kinds of servers and storage systems. A single type of support contract and process was applied for a common layer of infrastructure and virtualization. Investment for  converged  platforms of back up, security, load balancers,network was  done and ...

If your are a Head of IT department or you are managing your CSP's private cloud computing, a lot of questions, requests are coming for you soon. Many Telco vendors are deploying their applications on top of  X86 platforms and they announced even  supporting virtualized  environment. In most of Telecom operators, IT and Telco network are separated activities, dedicated budget and  teams. Telecom vendors use to offer the entire solution from hardware to software to service. Most of work was about integration new service within existing platforms, configuration and do planning and dimensioning of your network. With the huge decline of Telco revenue and the success of OTT business model, many CSPs are thinking about reducing CAPEX and OPEX and trying to be me more efficient, innovative and more faster to reach a better time to market. On the other hand, Cloud Computing is demonstrating a good success on IT domain. One decade was enough to bring IT on top o...

IT have started doing consolidation and platform virtualsation from a while. A good level of maturity is reached and many IT managers are planned to deploy Cloud layer in order to satisfy the fast growth of customers request and reach a best time to market. Many excited features and functions are offered by cloud platform like Service Portal, service Catalog, Capacity management, Automation and workflows feature and also a very important module called charge-back module. IT manger didn't give the same importance to such feature and focus only on the technical part of Cloud platforms. Consolidation and virtualization have helped companies reducing very well CAPEX and OPEX by improving the percent of hardware utilization and centralize support activities and knowledge. Reaching a high level of virtualization will reduce a while your investisment regarding infrastructure and hardware part. IT managers should be very careful in order to not doing the same error as before. IT was cons...