HP, Wind River Collaborate on NFV OpenStack Offering

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Wind River unveiled a collaboration last week at OpenStack Summit that will provide customers with a network functions virtualization (NFV) solution based on HP Helion OpenStack. The new offering was designed to enable carrier-grade NFV capabilities.

The companies worked on the project jointly, taking the HP Helion OpenStack offering and Wind River’s carrier-grade technologies to further the already developing OpenStack NFV market. According to OpenStack-focused vendor Mirantis, telecommunications companies have been experiencing success with OpenStack-based NFV. Although still a fairly new function, it appears that it is beginning to catch on with customers and vendors alike.

As for HP and Wind River, they have cloud services providers in mind with their joint venture.

“CSPs want the benefits of cloud computing, while meeting their rigorous reliability, performance and management requirements,” said Saar Gillai, senior vice president and COO of HP Cloud and general manager for NFV at HP, in a prepared statement. “HP and Wind River are collaborating to provide a fully integrated and supported HP Helion cloud solution for carrier grade NFV, enabling CSPs to leverage the agility that the over-the-top providers possess. We will also work together to enhance OpenStack technology to help ensure it evolves to meet carrier grade specifications.”

According to the two companies, the purpose of the new solution is to help cloud services providers compete better in a changing market. With the OpenStack NFV offering, HP and Wind River expect CSPs will be able to accelerate the transformation of their networks while also lower the total cost of ownership by adopting commercial, off-the-shelf hardware.

The carrier-grade NFV capabilities aren’t quite ready for customers, though. There’s still some work to do to get the HP/WindRiver OpenStack NFV solution together, but the companies plan to launch in 2015.

“The telecom industry is eager to tap into the vast potential of NFV. By taking advantage of a virtualized or cloud environment, service providers can easily and quickly introduce new high-value services while reducing costs. In every case, maintaining carrier grade reliability is critical,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO of Wind River, in a prepared statement. “By partnering with a leader like HP, we’re enabling a new generation of carrier grade, cloud-enabled NFV deployments for our customers in this changing market.”