I’m very pleased to report that I’ve been notified by the TM Forum that the CloudNFV Catalyst proposal we submitted for the June Nice conference has been approved. This Catalyst is aimed at demonstrating that TMF principles (GB922 and GB942) can be used to guide not only the deployment of virtual functions but also their ongoing management and their integration with non-NFV elements of services.
We will be meeting others involved in Catalysts at the Team Action Week meeting in Madrid in mid-February (just who all will be there from CloudNFV isn’t firm yet), and we’ll be providing a tutorial on our expanded management architecture, the foundation for the Catalyst, prior to that meeting.
All of you who read my blog know that CloudNFV is indebted to the TMF work for its high-level modeling, and to the ETSI NFV ISG for their work on functions virtualization and orchestration of virtualized elements. CloudNFV is using the same prototype implementation to drive both the ETSI ISG PoC and the TMF Catalyst, and we hope this will demonstrate that there is a way to approach virtual functions and NFV evolution that is consistent with and conserving of OSS/BSS principles. At the same time, we hope to demonstrate that our model can be used to selectively augment or even replace legacy operations practices in services and applications where major transformations are dictated either by service agility or cost considerations.
We are eager to work with management/operations vendors in later phases of our activity, and we remind those vendors that we have a process defined on the CloudNFV website to frame integration project proposals and move them along as fast as our resources permit. We will be working to set up our Catalyst workspace and we’ll provide a link to that when it’s available. We’ll also keep everyone posted on our activities on our own website. This is an open project, and we intend to share our findings fully.
We thank the TMF for considering our efforts worthy of acceptance, and I thank the members of the CloudNFV team and in particular the sponsors of the PoC and Catalyst for their efforts and support.