Huawei announced the launch of its new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) open lab in Xi’an, China.
The firm said the facility is dedicated to developing multi-vendor integration verification capabilities, expanding joint service innovations with customers, partners, industrial organizations and open source organizations and accelerating development of the open eco-system for NFV infrastructure, platforms and services.
Global leading operators and partners, including China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, VMware, Red Hat, Canonical and Linux Foundation attended the launch ceremony. These efforts mark a key step to realizing Huawei's future-oriented open SoftCOM architecture, which incorporates advanced technologies including NFV, SDN, and cloud computing.
Howard Liang, SVP and president of global technical services at Huawei, said, “The NFV open lab is an open innovation center of ICT convergence dedicated to being open and collaborative, expanding joint service innovations with partners, and developing the open eco-system of NFV to aggregate values and help customers achieve business success.”
With rapid development of cloud technology, user behavior has adopted five main characteristics: real-time; on-demand; all-online; DIY (Do it Yourself); and social, Huawei said.
In this new environment, traditional CT service architecture cannot meet user demands, meaning that operators are required to transition to ICT integrated cloud architecture. With these changes, new technologies have also emerged, the most dominant being NFV and SDN. Among its benefits, NFV allows traditional telecom networks to become more open and flexible, faster at service innovation enhancements, reduce operation and maintenance costs, and expand the industrial chain.
Huawei said it will continuously build its multi-vendor integration verification platform based on typical service scenarios, as well as accumulate experience through ongoing tests and projects to eventually build an NFV big data analysis platform.
Huawei in December announced the construction of a NFV Open Lab for telecom operators and equipment manufacturers to trial NFV, SDN and cloud computing technologies.