ADLINK and Wind River Systems establish joint lab to focus on remote integration and testing of NFV solutions

[51CTO.com original article] On February 16, 2017, ADLINK announced that it would join hands with Wind River Systems to jointly establish the "NFV Innovation Lab" in Shanghai to accelerate innovation in network communication services. This joint lab is a continuation of the R&D centers jointly established by the two companies in Shanghai, China and San Jose, USA in August 2016. Its infrastructure is to run Wind River Titanium Server software on ADLINK's modular industrial cloud computing architecture hardware platform. The two parties hope to provide software vendors, system equipment vendors and system service providers with a carrier-grade integration platform that can quickly perform software testing through pre-platform verification and system optimization, thereby accelerating the application of NFV in the communication industry.

The original intention of cooperation: win-win and openness

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Liu Jun, Chairman of ADLINK Technology, and Han Qing, Head of Wind River Systems Asia Pacific

Regarding the original intention of the cooperation between the two parties, Liu Jun, chairman of ADLINK, said that ADLINK and Wind River Systems have a common goal and hope to establish a new generation of NFV ecosystem through the laboratory to achieve interoperability, optimization and standardization of solutions. "In the new era of IoT and 5G, I hope to provide more advice and help to telecom operators in playing their new role as operators through the joint laboratory."

He emphasized that ADLINK hopes to create a win-win situation for all three parties, integrating the strengths of telecom operators, system integrators and platform suppliers.

He explained in detail that, first of all, the three major domestic operators also have their own testing platforms to carry out some development work for future scenarios, and the joint laboratory established by ADLINK Technology and Wind River is actually an extension of the telecom operator's laboratory, mobilizing more resources to carry out NFV research and development and adaptation work.

Secondly, for system integrators and platform suppliers, the joint laboratory can quickly integrate their solutions on the joint laboratory platform. Everyone can work together and, through the laboratory, present their solutions to telecom operators in a more comprehensive and in-depth manner, supporting telecom equipment manufacturers to accelerate the deployment of NFV.

Han Qing, Vice President of Wind River and General Manager of Asia Pacific, also attaches great importance to this cooperation. He said that NFV has been truly moving towards cloudification and openness in recent years, which is the basis for the establishment of this laboratory. He believes that the laboratory established this time is the most open. The reason for this is that ADLINK and Wind River are very clear about their positioning and sincerely hope that application manufacturers and integrators can join in. Everyone wins instead of monopolizing the interests of one company, and jointly expand the NFV industry. "We have fully communicated with the three major operators before, and they also recognize the concept of openness."

Han Qing believes that in the process of development from OT to IOT, technology is also changing, such as the application of cloud computing and virtualization technology. For OT companies, they can bring the advantages of technology in reliability, performance, latency, and maintenance to the IOT industry, and absorb the advantages of IT to form a platform that truly conforms to IOT.

What are the remaining barriers for operators to adopt NFV technology?

Liu Jun hopes to become the best partner of telecom operators through the "NFV Innovation Lab". So for telecom operators, what technical difficulties have NFV still not overcome?

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NFV Joint Laboratory Site

Luo Yujia, project manager of China Telecom, gave a detailed introduction to the problems China Telecom encountered in deploying NFV.

When it comes to NFVI computing node technology research, we encounter the problem of different forms of computing nodes. For example, there are many forms of operator servers, complex deployment, different levels of resource usage, and detailed differences in docking with virtualization software.

In addition, they also have a great demand for unified adaptation technology solutions. Luo Yujia revealed that rack/blade servers from different manufacturers have their own management systems, which provide information such as power supply, fan, BIOS, etc. Due to different parameters and presentation methods, management is complicated, and service providers are required to provide a unified hardware management view to shield the underlying hardware differences.

In terms of operation and maintenance and deployment, there is no unified standard for hardware form, the VIM cloud management platform is not stable enough, and a unified visual management platform is missing. "Although each manufacturer provides its own operation and maintenance and fault management platform, there is a lack of integration and the operation and maintenance complexity is too high."

"In our research on key operational-level technologies, we have also been paying attention to NFV reliability technologies and solutions." Luo Yujia said that at present, China has not yet proposed a comprehensive reliability design solution, fault location is unclear, and there is a lack of research on complete cross-layer fault management architecture, such as state protection mechanisms, fault detection, location, isolation technology and recovery mechanisms.

When talking about the goal of China Telecom's NFV laboratory, Luo Yujia said that China Telecom still hopes to integrate common hardware, network equipment, NFV products, and management software from multiple vendors in the industry to build an NFV test bed to evaluate the layered decoupling capabilities. In addition, it can also provide business-based testing and verification to evaluate the availability and reliability of NFV products and promote the commercialization of NFV.

China Telecom's goal for the NFV lab actually coincides with the purpose of establishing the joint lab. As Liu Jun said, "openness, flexibility, and standards" are the purpose of the joint lab. He hopes to play the role of the operator's best partner and then create more and better service methods, application platforms, application software and services. At the completion ceremony of the "NFV Innovation Lab", the three partner solutions displayed - Trend Micro's virtual network security, Edward Optical Networks (ADVA) Orchestrator and Setus' vBras, are also the best embodiment of the purpose of the joint lab.

The reporter learned that the "NFV Innovation Laboratory" jointly established by ADLINK and Wind River Systems currently has more than 20 researchers. The main equipment environment is placed in ADLINK's campus in Shanghai, which can support customers to remotely integrate and verify their NFV solutions around the world.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]

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