RAD Conducts its First Public Demo of Distributed NFV for Business Services

At Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, RAD will take another step towards facilitating Network Functions Virtualization deployment for business services by conducting its first live public demo of Distributed NFV (D-NFV).

“The common perception of NFV is that it has to be implemented in data centers, but in reality that approach isn’t ideal in every situation, in particular when targeting services for business customers,” notes Ulik Broida, RAD’s Vice President of Marketing. “In fact, some functions and capabilities, even if virtualized and implemented as software, are better located at the customer premises due to various considerations, such as performance, cost and data confidentiality.”

“For that reason, service providers should have the freedom to locate virtual functions where they will be most practical, beneficial and cost-effective – not just at data centers but also at network nodes and the customer premises itself,” Broida states.

RAD’s D-NFV solution responds to this need by integrating a Layer2/Layer3 FPGA-based NID and compute infrastructure with a standard x86 server. “This allows for a phased NFV deployment beginning with the implementation of virtual functions at the customer premises for initial subscribers,” Broida adds. “In other words, centralized investments are waived and, therefore, won’t outpace revenue,” he continues. “This centerless approach, therefore, is an effective first step towards full NFV deployment.”

Speeds Service Creation and Delivery and Reduces Operational Complexity
“The result is faster time-to-market for new revenue-enhancing services and the freedom to fit new network functionalities to meet rapidly changing needs and lower expenses,” Broida explains.

The D-NFV demo will cover two applications deployed as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) – firewall applications and enhanced traffic reporting diagnostics with optional service chaining.

“The benefits of bringing virtualization to the customer site are convincing,” Broida concludes. “We anticipate that this live demo will be seen as a major step towards commercial deployment.”