anitsh
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3 years ago OPNFV
OPNFV promotes an open source network that brings companies together to accelerate innovation, as well as market new technologies. OPNFV brings together service providers, cloud and infrastructure vendors, developers, and customers to create an open source platform to speed up the development and deployment of NFV for both enterprise and service provider networks.
Open Platform for NFV Project Goals and Objectives
Not only does OPNFV put industry leaders together to hone NFV capabilities, but it also provides consistency and interoperability. Since many NFV foundational elements already are in use, the organization assists with upstream projects to manage continued integration and testing, as well as address any voids in development. The organization focuses its efforts on five goals:
Develop an open-source platform that can be used to increase NFV functionality, bringing new products and services to the market faster.
Involve top companies that use NFV so OPNFV meets the standards they will need.
Contribute to and be a part of open source projects that will likely become integrated with the OPNFV platform for an overall consistency and interoperability between components.
Establish an ecosystem where NFV products are based on open standards and software to meet needs.
Promote OPNFV as the go-to for open source NFV.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
What is a network function? The term typically refers to some component of a network infrastructure that provides a well-defined functional behavior, such as intrusion detection, intrusion prevention or routing.
Traditionally, we have deployed such network functions as physical appliances, where software is tightly coupled with specific, proprietary hardware. These physical network functions need to be manually installed into the network, creating operational challenges and preventing rapid deployment of new network functions.
NFV is a way to virtualize network services, such as routers, firewalls, and load balancers, that have traditionally been run on proprietary hardware. These services are packaged as virtual machines (VMs) on commodity hardware, which allows service providers to run their network on standard servers instead of proprietary ones. This process of virtualization also of the function is also called as Virtualized Network Function (VNF) which means to the implementation of a network function using software that is decoupled from the underlying hardware.
NFV separates a network's key functions (like directory services, file sharing, and IP configuration) so they can be distributed among environments. Once software functions are independent of the physical machines they once lived on, specific functions can be packaged together into a new network and assigned to an environment. Virtualizing networks reduces the number of physical components—like switches, routers, servers, cables, and hubs—that are needed to create multiple, independent networks, and it’s particularly popular in the telecommunications industry.
With NFV, you don’t need to have dedicated hardware for each network function. NFV improves scalability and agility by allowing service providers to deliver new network services and applications on demand, without requiring additional hardware resources.
NFV Architecture
The NFV architecture proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is helping to define standards for NFV implementation. Each component of the architecture is based on these standards to promote better stability and interoperability.
NFV architecture consists of: Virtualized network functions (VNFs) are software applications that deliver network functions such as file sharing, directory services, and IP configuration. Network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) consists of the infrastructure components—compute, storage, networking—on a platform to support software, such as a hypervisor like KVM or a container management platform, needed to run network apps. Management, automation and network orchestration (MANO) provides the framework for managing NFV infrastructure and provisioning new VNFs.
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