Nokia has announced that it will be collaborating with Intel to make its carrier-grade AirFrame Data Centere Solution hardware available for an Open Platform Network Functions Virtualisation (OPNFV) Lab.
The hardware will be used by the OPNFV collaborative open source community to accelerate the delivery of cloud-enabled networks and applications.
The Lab, announced by Nokia at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin, will be a critical testbed for NFV developers and accelerates the introduction of commercial open source NFV products and services. It enables developers to test carrier-grade NFV applications for performance and availability while supporting operators’ preferences for non-proprietary, high-performing, and interoperable NFV platforms.
Nokia is making its AirFrame Data Center Solution available as a public OPNFV Lab with the support of Intel, which is providing Intel Xeon processors and Intel Solid State Drives to give communications service providers the advantage of testing OPNFV projects on the latest server and storage technologies. The Lab will enable the development and continuous integration of OPNFV releases to meet the stringent requirements of carrier-ready networks.
Antti Romppanen, head of product and technology management, Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure, Nokia, said, said, “Nokia’s AirFrame Data Center Solution is designed from the ground up to meet telco requirements, and therefore is a perfect platform for the OPNFV to test new NFV software components destined for operator cloud networks. Nokia Cloud Stack Infra for Realtime (NCIR) applications like Radio Cloud is optimised to be fully nokia.com supported in OPNFV and AirFrame on hardware and software layers. Nokia and Intel collaborated closely on the AirFrame solution and the two companies are well positioned to optimise the performance of the whole OPNFV stack.”
John Healy, General Manager, Network Function Virtualisation Division, Intel, said, “Now,communications service providers can test their virtualised network functions on the latest servers based on Intel Xeon processors and Intel Solid State Drives in the open OPNFV lab environment. This allows for much faster testing of new capabilities and will ultimately help accelerate NFV implementations.”
