Nokia on Tuesday said it is teaming up with Cisco, Ericsson, and Huawei on a new Network Function Virtualization (NFV) initiative to promote interoperability across industry solutions.
Under the freshly signed memorandum of understanding, the companies have agreed to form the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI), which Nokia said will “NFV multi-vendor interoperability challenges for communication service providers, enabling them to optimize NFV deployment and integration costs, and reduce time-to-market for new services.”
Nokia said the project will hone in on testing interoperability configurations of commercial NFV solutions that are actually used in service providers’ networks. The initiative will also recommend generic principles – including interoperability test cases, test criteria, processes, methods, guidelines, templates, and testing tools – and best practices for existing interoperability testing activities in the industry, including NVIOT forum efforts. The company said the NFV-ITI will be closely aligned with the OPNFV project and the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group.
Long Jiping, vice president of R&D in Huawei’s Business Unit Cloud Core Network, said the group is hoping more vendors will join the initiative to address interoperability challenges.
“Supporting the creation of the NFV-ITI is another step towards ensuring service providers can smoothly migrate to cloud networks within today’s multi-vendor environment,” Ron Haberman, vice president of CloudBand at Nokia, added. “While the network model is changing with NFV, the need for true carrier-grade performance remains paramount. Ensuring the integration, automation and interoperability of robust, well-architected virtualization solutions is critical to the performance, scalability, resiliency, and manageability our customers demand.”
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0, Infrastructure