Open Network Featured Article

Many companies are moving their workloads into the cloud and utilizing the OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service model to help them reach their goals. OpenStack, which first launched in 2010, has become popular with many enterprises large and small for the way in which it manages workloads and allows users to customize its open source interface.

Among the large companies, Verizon (News - Alert) has taken a liking to OpenStack. The global telecom recently announced that it has completed the deployment of a large-scale network functions virtualization (NFV) project in five of its U.S. data centers. Verizon reportedly began this project just last year to help streamline the increasingly complex networking it handles on behalf of its business and consumer customers. Adam Koeppe, the vice president of network technology planning at Verizon, commented that this marks the beginning of how his company will connect all types of users and applications within the cloud.

“Building on our history of innovation, this NFV project is another step in building Verizon’s next-generation network,” Koeppe began.

“New and emerging applications are highlighting the need for collaborative research and development in technologies like NFV. We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app,” he continued.

Other influential business entities have previously spoken about the reach of NFV in OpenStack. Red Hat (News - Alert) has called the virtualization of network functions a “driving force in the OpenStack community” even as Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has called for additional development to help mature OpenStack’s ability to handle distributed clouds, lifecycle management, and high-performance data planes.

Verizon clearly has a belief that NFV and OpenStack can coexist and work well now and in the future of telecommunications. It worked directly with Big Switch Networks, Dell (News - Alert), and Red Hat to launch this integration on more than 50 racks in its five data centers. Red Hat’s Ceph Storage links with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to create the base virtual infrastructure on each server rack. Big Switch offered its Big Cloud Fabric for SDN controller software to manage the Dell network switches that users can control from within Red Hat’s software.

The group has now reached a point where it believes the setup can work well on this large scale without finding bandwidth bottlenecks during peak customer use. In addition, the setup is expected to offer Verizon the flexibility it needs to grow and handle new services while also reducing the complexity associated with company operations. The launch of this operations model should also provide Verizon with better network visibility and protection against threats. Altogether, this should benefit customers as much as it does Verizon because the increases in speed and security should advance directly into customer services.