We have posted the following on the proof-of-concept mailing list for the ETSI NFV ISG, offering our participation in the NFV body’s work in this area and offering integration with other NFV members. We invite parties interested in integrating with us to review our preliminary guidelines on our website, http://www.cloudnfv.com/ and also to apply to join the CloudNFV Group on LinkedIn. We will approve the Join requests when the group opens up, which we now expect will be in August.
CIMI Corporation will be submitting three POC proposals for consideration, based on the CloudNFV platform created by seven member companies in the NFV. CloudNFV is an NFV implementation built for OpenStack. A formal POC proposal document will be contributed in August, but we will propose a three-phase POC because of the scope of the issues we hope to explore.
The first proposal is aimed at validating the data modeling of NFV processes from the retail service level down to the virtual function level. We want to validate the information needed to describe a virtual function, deploy it, connect it with other functions, and connect the combination with live network equipment and user endpoints. We will, in this phase, establish the requirements to deploy, run, and manage VNFs and aggregations of VNFs deployed as services or service components. We expect that this POC proposal will be available for demonstration and review in September, and we will contribute the results.
The second proposal targets the actual deployment and management of VNFs on conforming infrastructure. In this POC we seek to validate the links between NFV and OSS/BSS/NMS frameworks, based on our TMF GB922-compatible service model. We also seek to validate our architecture for federating NFV at the cloud infrastructure level upward to the retail service level, and to confirm the structure needed for cross-management and settlement.
The third proposal targets deployment of retail end-to-end services and traffic management in a completely federated, global, NFV-compliant network. In this POC we seek to identify the operational challenges of global-scale federated NFV infrastructure and to establish the parameters of the management model needed for things like horizontal scaling, availability and QoS guarantees, transitioning from legacy devices to virtual functions, and integration of virtual-function services with cloud SaaS.
We will be publishing guidelines for integrating with CloudNFV in August, and at that point we will consider proposals from NFV member companies to integrate with us by providing virtual functions to host, network and server/system technology on which to run both our platforms and functions, and management and deployment tools to explore further optimizations in this area.