Mirantis to Drive NFV Deployments Using OpenStack

Moving to make it simpler to use an OpenStack cloud management framework to manage network functions virtualization (NFV) software that promises to change how network services are delivered and managed, Mirantis, in partnership with Citrix, Metaswitch Networks and Overture Networks, this week announced a Mirantis NFV Initiative.

In effect, Mirantis is creating a reference architecture for deploy NFV software that not only spans its distribution of OpenStack, but also encompasses session border controllers from Metaswitch Networks, application delivery controllers from Citrix (CTXS) and service orchestration software from Overture Networks.

Kamesh Pemmaraju, vice president of Product and Partner Marketing at Mirantis, said his company is looking to accelerate the adoption of NFV software to replace many of the physical appliances currently cluttering networking environments. To accomplish that goal, MSPs and telecommunications carriers need access to a framework that is optimized to manage those NFVs, said Pemmaraju.

While there is much debate over the degree to which OpenStack can scale, Pemmaraju noted it’s possible to get to the 200-node range using the Mirantis OpenStack distribution running on appliances that have been certified by Mirantis. For most MSPs and carriers, that’s more than sufficient to launch a pilot project or support a small deployment, he said. In fact, he noted that many smaller MSPs and carriers can steal a march on larger rivals that won’t be able to fully deploy NFVs at a massive scale until well into next year at the earliest.

All told, market research firm Technology Business Research expects NFVs, in conjunction with the software-defined networking software needed to manage them, to be worth about $157 billion by 2020. Obviously, the balance of that growth is expected to come at the back end of this decade.

In the meantime, MSPs should be giving some serious thought to the investments they need to make today to stay relevant tomorrow. MSPs and carriers that base their services on NFVs will be much more agile than their competitors, and in a world where organizations increasingly expect every service to be available on demand, MSPs that take months to fire up network services will cease to exist.

Like most things, however, NFV expertise is not something that can be developed overnight, which means MSPs that have not already started down this path are already becoming less relevant with each passing day.