Network Functions Virtualization: The New Virtual Reality

Marcus Weldon Corporate CTO

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VIRTUALIZATION: A (CYNICAL) ENGINEER’S VIEW

VIRTUALIZATION IS THE ANSWER BUT WE NEED TO BE MORE THAN BLIND MONKEYS !

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FORCE CONSEQUENCE

Massive Capacity Expansion Higher speed packet & optical transport and backhaul for small cells

Commoditization of Access Wireless is the new “Wireline”

Network & Data Center Merging Move to software-defined and ‘virtualized’ networks

Network Becoming Programmable Platform

Any web service/enterprise ‘Cloud’ app can fully leverage the network

Transformation @ web speed New delivery paradigm and OSS/BSS that adapts at web scale and speed

Evolu

tion

Revolu

tion

INDUSTRY DISRUPTION DRIVEN BY AND AT WEBSCALE & SPEED

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

FORCES AT PLAY AND CONSEQUENCES

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WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

ANATOMY OF A TELCO APPLICATION (ATCA)

System Control & Management Cards Specialized OAM middleware

I/O and load distribution Specialized application middleware

Application Function A More cards for more capacity

Application Function B More (different) cards for more capacity

Specialized blades with dedicated processors Many different/specialized OS’s

STANDARD COMPONENTS IN SPECIALIZED CONFIGURATION = ‘BOX SCALING RULES’

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• Processors stopped getting faster

a decade ago

But more transistors per chip =

more processor cores

But need to create SW that

leverages this parallel scaling

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM ?

BOX SCALING AND WEBSCALE ARE WORLDS AND DECADES APART

SCALE COMES FROM RUNNING IN PARALLEL

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WHAT’S THE ANSWER: PARALLEL SCALING

App Speed Up = 1

(1-P) + P/N

Amdahl’s Law

P = Parallel Portion of App

N= # Processors

VIRTUALIZATION IS THE FASTEST PATH TO WEBSCALE FOR NETAPPS

With Virtualization, P 1

Source: Wikipedia

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NfV Industry Specification Group (ISG)

• ~60 Operator-led activity in ETSI

• Alcatel-Lucent leadership: only one of two

vendors on the NfV Management Team

Goals:

­ Align on architecture and terminology

­ Identify benefits and assess cost implications

­ NFV ISG will not create it is own standards,

rather:

• Specifications that leverage existing industry

standards

• Provide recommendations to other SDOs

WHAT IS THE INDUSTRY DOING?

INDUSTRY IS VIRTUALLY UNITED

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WHAT IS THE VALUE OF VIRTUALIZATION ?

Virtualization Value Factor Qualitative Benefit Quantitative Benefit

Dyn

am

ic

Co

ntr

ol

G

ain

Fa

cto

rs

Elastic scaling Greater ability to react to

changing demand n/a

Faster deployment cycles Shorter time to market for new

apps/SW releases n/a

Domain-specific network slicing/control

Better network re-use and OAM/fault isolation

n/a

Co

st

Ga

in

Fa

cto

r Lower CapEx + OpEx (TCO)

n/a

Depends on Application

NEED TO CLEARLY UNDERSTAND THE GOALS TO DEFINE OPTIMAL ANSWER

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VIRTUALIZATION BENEFIT ANALYSIS

Dynamic Control:

• Elastic scale

• Resource pooling

• Rapid deployment

• Location optimization

Cost (TCO):

• NPU vs CPU (CapEx)

• Technicians (OpEx)

VIRTUALIZATION BENEFITS MOST (BUT NOT ALL) NETWORK DOMAINS

Network Analytics Probes

Cost Gain

High

Low

More Less

Dyn

am

ic C

on

tro

l G

ain

Media Gateways

Control Plane Functions

Ethernet Switches

Edge Routers

Core Routers

Network Apps

Media Servers

Orchestration Functions

Packet Gateways

Service Creation Functions

Analytics Platforms

Element & Network

Managers

CPE

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$0M

$20M

$40M

$60M

$80M

$100M

$120M

Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5

Traditional Cloudified

$0M

$50M

$100M

$150M

$200M

$250M

$300M

Operations Energy Maintenance Space

Traditional Cloudified

CapEx OpEx

Virtualization will typically lead to an increase in CapEx for high

throughput applications

….which must be offset by a decrease in OpEx due to automated DC operations (fewer technicians)

VIRTUALIZATION BENEFIT ANALYSIS: ePC

LOW BW APPS TCO GAIN; HIGH BW APPS NO TCO GAIN (BUT DYNAMIC CONTROL GAIN)

Virtualized

Specialized

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EVOLUTION OF NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALIZATION

Operations

Evolution

Infrastructure Evolution

AUTO-SCALING

“CLOSED”

VIRTUALIZATION

AUTO-ONBOARDING

“OPEN”

VIRTUALIZATION

WE ARE ALREADY ON THE PATH TO THIS NEW VIRTUAL REALITY

Closed

Virtualization

Apps run on GPP + hypervisor,

but on specialized HW for

carrier grade reliability

Open

virtualization

Apps run on Cloud

infrastructure w/elastic scaling

and Cloud-grade reliability

Auto-

Onboarding

Automation of on-boarding,

installation and test

Auto-Scaling Automatic scaling of app

functions based on demand

~Today

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Benefits (Both approaches)

• More capacity per blade

• More optimal use of HW

• Able to reallocate HW to varying

workloads

Open Virtualization Closed Virtualization

EVOLUTION OF NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALIZATION FROM CLOSED TO OPEN VIRTUALIZATION

Common Cloud Management

Standard

APIs

App A Mgt App B Mgt

App A VM

Server Blade

Hypervisor

App B VM

Standard APIs

System Middleware

App B Mgt

App B VM

Server Blade

Hypervisor

App B VM

System Middleware

App A VM

Server Blade

App A Mgt

Hypervisor

App A VM

Proprietary

APIs

Proprietary

APIs

Benefits (Open approach)

• Sharing HW across multiple

applications

• Operations simplification due to

common management layer

Risks (Open approach)

• New reliability, performance &SLA models

• Impact on both NetOps & IT orgs

• Failure accountabilities change (NG OSS)

WITH EVERY REWARD COMES RISKS THAT NEED TO BE MANAGED

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Network Services Control

Telco IP Network Infrastructure

KEY OPPORTUNITY FOR SOLUTION TO ENABLE SINGULAR FUTURE

Dynamic Control

Dynamic Control

Dynamic Control

Convergence

Automated, Simplified

Choreography

Automated, Simplified

Choreography

Cloudscale

BUT THE OPPORTUNITY IS BIG

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MASSIVE PARADIGM SHIFT FROM CLOSED, STATIC CONFIGURATION TO OPEN, DYNAMIC ADAPTATION

OUR VISION OF THE FUTURE EVOLVING HLN TO A PROGRAMMABLE, CONSUMABLE CLOUD NETWORK

Virtualize

Software

Define IP INFRASTRUCTURE

NETWORK APPLICATIONS

NETWORK SERVICES CONTROL

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vSwitches vStorage VMs

Cloudstack

CloudBand Management System

OpenStack+

BGP Federated Control Plane

Application

cPaaS

Applications

Nuage Virtualized Services Platform

Nuage API

L2/L3 IP/MPLS VPN Services

Nuage DC Network

Cloudnodes

Traditional and Cloud-aware Applications

Applications Network Aware

Applications

EVOLUTION OF NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALIZATION AUTO-X (ONBOARDING, SCALING, NETWORKING)

MASSIVE PARADIGM SHIFT FROM CLOSED, STATIC CONFIGURATION TO OPEN, DYNAMIC ADAPTATION

Automated

onboarding,

orchestration and

placement of

Compute and

Storage resources

Automated, adaptive,

application-specific

DC (and WAN)

networking, based on

dynamic policy pull

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VIRTUALIZING AND SOFTWARE-DEFINING THE FUTURE NETWORK

Network OS

Access Metro Core

Regional Data Center

Public

Cloud

Local Data Center

National Data Center

ADAPT

ANTICIPATE

INTERPRET

PERSONALIZED, DYNAMIC, PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKING

VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-

DEFINED OPTICAL

NETWORKING

VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-

DEFINED CPE

VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-

DEFINED WIRELESS

NETWORKING

VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-

DEFINED COMMUNICATIONS

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VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING (1/2)

OPTIMIZED NETWORKING WITH OPTIMUM ECONOMICS

CloudNode

Camera flow detected

Traffic Mgmt

IPv4/IPv6

DHCP Parental Ctrl

Video Opt

TOR

Simple CPE BNG

(w/vCPE)

Access Node

Virtual CPE

Steer traffic to right Service Chain

Virtualized CPE

Dynamic, low cost/complexity Home Networking

• Simple ‘Media Converter’ CPE, with infinite flexibility

• Application chaining links vCPE functions based on user, device, app

• Network dynamically steers traffic to vCPE functions

SDN NFV

Dynamic Optical Capacity

Dynamic, high BW, low-latency Enterprise Networking

• Automated turn-up, scaling, rearrangement of bandwidth across optical network

• Rapidly recover from site, node, and link failures

• Automated multi-layer optimization

Service Provider DC

Enterprise Branch

Enterprise optical capacity dynamically

boosted

Enterprise critical flow detected

Metro Aggregation

Node

SDN NFV

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VIRTUALIZED, SOFTWARE-DEFINED WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

DYNAMICALLY OPTIMIZED SPECTRUM SLICING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Create eMBMS slice

Dynamically

Control eMBMS

vs. unicast

partition

Dynamic Wireless Capacity

Dynamic, lowest cost Wireless Networking

• Slice spectrum for optimal multicast/unicast per cell, per location, per time of day

• Optimized delivery using all available capacity dimensions

SDN NFV

eNB

ePC

eMBMS GW

Dynamically

Smartload using

off-peak capacity

vCDN

Provider IMS

vIMS WebRTC

GW

Dynamic Communications

Dynamic, lowest cost Comms Networking

• Network applications with dynamic web scale and virtual instances per app

• Pay as you grow, transaction-based web comms services

Dynamically create

and connect

WebRTC GW

Create vIMS

instance for

app

SDN NFV

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• NFV will greatly enhance the ability of ‘network applications’ to elastically scale to meet changing demand patterns:

­ Changing demand by unpredictable usage of operator own applications (above ‘peak’ loads for special events)

­ Changing demand by unpredictable usage by web applications accessing operator network apps

• NFV and SDN also create new value propositions

­ Slicing to create individual, deterministic, automated and optimized DC and WAN networks

­ Simplification of CPE but with infinite functionality (and lifetime)

­ Simplification of operations (provisioning, management, on-boarding)

­ Flexibility to roll out innovative applications quickly and with low risk (new revenue opportunities)

Value is not always about CapEx or TCO savings

• But significant challenges remain to realize full value

SUMMARY PERSPECTIVE

WE ARE LEADING THE WAY TO CREATE THIS NEW VIRTUAL REALITY

To learn more about Alcatel-Lucent Cloud, visit us at our website or at one of our social media platforms.

www.alcatel-lucent.com/solutions/cloud