Dell Plans for Big NFV, SDN OpenStack Push

It looks like Dell has big plans for the network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) space. Some of those plans revolve around the open source world; and that shows with Dell's latest OpenStack-related announcement.

A partnership formed in December 2013 with Red Hat (RHT) is being expanded. Together, the two companies will be working on co-engineering NFV and SDN for OpenStack, specifically for the telecommunications market segment. But Dell is also collaborating on such endeavors with Calsoft Labs to deliver NFV and SDN within Dell OEM products.

Dell is also taking a much stronger role in CloudNFV, a consortium focused on demonstrating and implementing an open, cloud-based NFV model to further adoption by telecom organizations.

That's a lot of NFV news for one company's announcement. Based on what is being written elsewhere, Dell's NFV and SDN initiatives are being rolled out across the entire company's product groups. Of course, much of this work is being done to further Dell's growing cloud solutions business.

"We work closely with innovators in the telecommunications industry to bring their products to market faster and more efficiently by providing ready-to-go, high-performing solutions that are easily customizable. Dell OEM Solution's market insight, flexibility and speed in delivering tailored solutions separate us from other manufacturers and integrators," said Joyce Mullen, vice president and general manager, Dell OEM Solutions, in a prepared statement.

Dell and Red Hat have a roadmap that will place the co-engineered NFV and SDN products in the market sometime this year. That's about as specific as the companies were willing to get. But other products Dell is involved in will be ready in spring 2014, including its Dell PowerEdge R420xr ruggedized server and the Dell PowerVault MD3400, MD3800 and MD3960 series products.

Add in more work to the CloudNFV project, and Dell may be a vendor to watch as the NFV/SDN trend continues to grow. And Dell's channel-focused go-to-market strategy that has become critical to the company over the last few years should provide plenty of NFV/SDN opportunities for partners as customers catch on to the technologies' benefits.