Accelerate NFV Adoption

Transcription

1 Enterprise Strategy Group Getting to the bigger truth. White Paper Accelerate NFV Adoption Pensa Maestro NFV Dramatically Reduces Time and Complexity By Bob Laliberte, ESG Senior Analyst February 2018 This ESG White Paper was commissioned by Pensa and is distributed under license from ESG.

2 White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 2 Contents Introduction... 3 Challenges... 3 The Solution: Pensa Maestro NFV... 4 The Benefits of Pensa Maestro NFV... 6 The Bigger Truth... 6

3 Introduction White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 3 Communication service providers (CSPs) are under tremendous pressure to transform their business models and underlying infrastructures to better serve their customers. These organizations are implementing digital transformation initiatives that encompass many different aspects of the business, including people, processes, and technology. However, it will be imperative for them to get the technology transformation correct to meet ever-changing requirements and ensure the overall success of the program. Faced with increasing bandwidth demands for video, over-the-top (OTT) apps, and Internet of Things (IoT), CSPs will need to implement a highly dynamic and flexible environment. Keep in mind that these organizations are still monetizing existing 2, 3, and 4G technologies while at the same time preparing for the next evolution to 5G. To help with this transformation, these organizations need to transition from static legacy environments to highly dynamic virtualized environments. Figure 1. CSP Environment Transition Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Unfortunately, this is not an easy transition as purpose-built hardware appliances are being replaced with fully virtualized environments running on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. While the envisioned end state will provide CSPs with a highly responsive and scalable environment, the transition to network functions virtualization (NFV) will take time. A number of proof points will be required before this technology becomes fully adopted in production environments. It will be up to the CSP, system integrator (SI), network equipment provider (NEP), or IT vendor to ensure interoperability and demonstrate performance on par with or better than the existing environment. Organizations are actively building lab, pilot, and pre-production environments to thoroughly stress-test this infrastructure. Challenges Despite their best efforts to onboard these new virtualized technologies, organizations face a number of challenges that could delay adoption. To be clear, these challenges can be overcome. However, in many cases, it will require new tools and solutions to help. Some of these challenges include: Difficulty onboarding virtual network functions (VNFs): Without clear standards, just onboarding VNFs could provide significant hurdles, especially with heterogeneous VNFs, as each may follow a different model. The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) looks to solve this problem. However, in large environments looking to test multiple vendors, this could present its own challenge. Currently, the best practice from

4 White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 4 leading-edge providers is to work closely with vendors, but manual processes like this can be difficult to scale, especially when organizations are evaluating many different VNFs in a proof of concept. As a result, the process of onboarding VNFs itself can significantly slow down projects. Lack of skills: Because NFV is still a relatively nascent technology, your organization may not have acquired or built up the skill sets required to fully test and deploy virtualized network functions, let alone optimize them. Once VNFs have been onboarded, organizations need to understand how best to design an end-to-end service and validate that design. The validation process will help to eliminate costly and time-consuming trial and error scenarios. Eventually, like in any major technology transition, operations and architects will acquire the requisite knowledge. However, CSPs need to accelerate this transition to remain competitive. Difficulty demonstrating performance: This is the most important challenge to overcome in order to deploy systems in a production environment and will also be required to dispel any doubts CSPs have about the virtualized technology. To demonstrate the performance of the VNF, a CSP will need to be able to quickly and efficiently construct lab environments to properly validate the functionality and performance of the solution. In addition, it should be able to demonstrate the solution s ability to scale, both up and down, as elasticity is a key part of virtualized environments. Difficulty verifying interoperability: In the early days of any new technology, vendors vying for market share will either select a de facto standard or create their own to accelerate sales and ensure lock-in. As a result, CSPs have to determine what software and hardware will work together, as well as which VNFs will effectively work with each other. CSPs will need to ensure compatibility amongst VNFs and then, eventually, their compatibility with orchestration engines. This is one of the first steps that need to occur in the lab environment. Difficulty transitioning to production: It is one thing for organizations to get a solution running in a controlled environment at a limited scale, but another thing to seamlessly transition it to a production environment. Production environments require lifecycle tools to enable them to manage the daily adds, moves, and changes prevalent in modern production environments. In addition, organizations will need to ensure NFVs compatibility with orchestration solutions. Organizations need to overcome these challenges and accelerate the process of testing, piloting, and deploying VNFs into their lab and production environments. Leading-edge service providers have started to make this transition, but it has required a lot of manual effort and trial and error testing. The Solution: Pensa Maestro NFV Given these challenges, organizations clearly need solutions to overcome those roadblocks and accelerate the process of adopting VNFs. This is precisely what Pensa set out to create three years ago when it started working on its Maestro NFV solution. Pensa recognized that there would be a need for organizations to be able to onboard heterogeneous VNFs, and design, validate, build, and deliver network services in a simple, easy-to-use platform. Specifically, the Pensa solution will provide organizations with the abilities outlined in Figure 2.

5 White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 5 Figure 2. Pensa Capabilities Source: Pensa Onboard The first step to transforming to a highly virtualized environment is to onboard VNFs into a common library. Pensa Maestro NFV is capable of either importing existing VNF packages or creating new ones, including a VNF descriptor. After this has been accomplished, Maestro can validate, test, and import the VNF package into a catalog, enabling each VNF to be easily imported into a service design. Design In the next phase, organizations need to design virtual services made up of one or potentially more VNFs. To expedite the design process, Maestro was designed to be user-friendly, enabling architects to leverage drag and drop functionality to create dynamic visual topologies. In addition to being able to rapidly create designs, Maestro can validate the design in real time to ensure the services can be executed as designed. Validate In many cases, organizations either manually validate a solution or simply wait to verify after the solution has been deployed in the laboratory. To overcome time-consuming and costly changes after deployment, Pensa has built an advanced network services validation engine to ensure organizations can validate designs prior to expensive buildouts. In addition to validating the virtual services, it is capable of validating physical network functions and even the physical server hardware necessary to satisfy the required service levels. Build The next stage is to actually build out the design in the lab. Because no two CSPs are alike, no two labs will be alike. Maestro understands this and designed its solution to integrate with existing environments leveraging REST APIs. Once integrated, Maestro provides a sandbox capability to automatically bring up the complete environment to be tested. Additionally, Maestro is working with major players in the vendor supply chain to properly size the hardware requirements. For selected vendors, this includes creating a cost list as well as a bill of materials to facilitate the procurement process. Deliver The seamless transition from a lab environment to a production environment will be essential. To enable organizations to make this transition, Maestro leverages industry standards like the Open Network Automation Platform Project (ONAP) and Open Source MANO (OSM) to ensure future compatibility. Given its modular design and

6 White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 6 flexible APIs, Maestro can integrate with virtually any orchestration platform and help to accelerate the transition from test to production. The solution was designed to be used not only by CSPs, but also by systems integrators (SIs), network equipment providers (NEPs), and IT vendors. In many cases, CSPs will seek outside help from consultants or equipment (in this case, VNF) vendors to help accelerate the adoption of VNFs in their environments. The thinking is sound, as in many cases these organizations have been developing and working with this technology for a longer period and are more familiar with it. Unfortunately, most are only familiar with their specific technology or the technology used on their last project. Pensa is working to eliminate variances by creating a standard model (based on TOSCA) to enable the rapid onboarding, design of services, design validation, and required hardware support for the desired performance. This will enable organizations to transition those services into production environments, and will include the ability to migrate from/to other orchestration engines in a future release. The Benefits of Pensa Maestro NFV How will CSPs, SIs, NEPs, and IT vendors benefit from Pensa? The ability to leverage a standards-based model that is simple to use and implement will enable organizations to: Save time by accelerating the VNF onboarding process. Regardless of the vendor, Pensa Maestro NFV enables organizations to rapidly onboard VNFs with full detailed descriptions and creates a library of VNFs ready to be leveraged in a service design. This fully automated process can enable organizations to reduce onboarding time from weeks to hours. Reduce training and design time of highly skilled resources by leveraging a simplified user interface that allows for drag-and-drop VNF insertion to create service designs. In addition to creating the service design, Pensa Maestro NFV will generate a bill of materials for COTS hardware to expedite requisition and acquisition, thus streamlining the build process and eliminating the need to consume highly skilled resources time. Mitigate risk. Organizations build lab environments to ensure they are not introducing a problem into their production environment and validate the functionality of the services being deployed. In many cases, new technologies or designs require time to stabilize and/or optimize within an environment. VNFs are no different. Pensa is leveraging its years of experience in this space to help validate the platform s service design, prior to its being deployed in the lab. It can then provide a closed loop verification once installed. These capabilities should help to mitigate any risk and accelerate the time for deploying services in production, allowing for sandbox validation of interoperability and feature functionality. Accelerate transition to production environments with integration with orchestration. The last step of the process will be integrating VNFs with an orchestration engine. Future capabilities will include the ability to migrate from/to other orchestration platforms The Bigger Truth Since they are currently on the cusp of 5G adoption, the realization of a tsunami of video traffic, and expansion of IoT uses cases, CSPs need to transform their environments from static, legacy environments to highly agile and dynamic platforms. This will enable them to adjust to changing business dynamics as well as new traffic flows. The process will not be easy, nor will it happen overnight.

7 White Paper: Accelerate NFV Adoption 7 It can, however, accelerate from its current pace by leveraging solutions that help to simplify the onboarding, design, validation, build, and delivery phases of network services. Manual efforts and best guesses early on only introduce errors and create delays later in the process, when they are more costly and time-consuming. Organizations need a more standardized and simple process that can be leveraged across heterogeneous environments. Pensa has been developing a solution to enable just such a process. It is called Maestro NFV and it can help enable CSPs, SIs, NEMs, and IT vendors to accelerate the process of onboarding, designing, validating, building, and deploying NFVs into lab and production environments, including facilitating connectivity to orchestration solutions. If you are currently testing or piloting NFV solutions or are one of the lucky few organizations to have NFVs currently in production, Maestro NFV can help your organization accelerate the adoption and deployment of NFVs and manage them across their lifecycles.

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