Download Telecom Egypt CEO Mohammed Elnawawy: New unified licence

May/June 2014 Number 134 A Euromoney Institutional Investor Publication
global telecoms
BUSINESS
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Telecom Egypt CEO
Mohammed Elnawawy:
New unified licence
means we will
break relationship
with Vodafone
Open Networking Foundation
Operators know that continuing business as usual is not sustainable, writes Dan Pitt. But the
combination of NFV and SDN can help operators compete
Combining NFV and SDN will open door to
new revenue and help operators compete
NFV and SDN are complementary technologies
that offer significant benefits by allowing operators
to use off-the-shelf servers, operating-system software — often open-source — and virtualisation to cut
network capital and operating expenses.
Combining NFV and SDN also opens the door for
new revenue by enabling operators to introduce new
services quickly and to capitalise on excess network
capacity — even for a short time — to offer ad-hoc,
on-demand services.
Carriers know that continuing business as usual is
not sustainable. Here’s how the combination of NFV
and SDN can help you compete.
Dan Pitt: NFV and SDN are
complementary technologies that
offer significant benefits by allowing
operators to use off-the-shelf servers
and operating-system software to cut
capital and operating expenses
The role of NFV
Virtualisation technology can bring the same efficiencies and cost advantages to networking as it has to computing and storage — which is crucial for operators in
today’s fiercely competitive telecoms market.
Thanks to a recent agreement between the Open
Networking Foundation and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the effort to develop
virtualisation solutions aimed squarely at operators
has taken a major step forward.
ETSI is working to accelerate network functions
virtualisation, which enables functions such as load
balancing and firewalling to run as software processes
on commodity servers and switches. NFV reduces
the need for expensive, single-purpose appliances
that today cost the global telecoms industry billions
in equipment and maintenance expenses.
Software defined networking provides the programmable network connectivity that’s crucial to NFV’s
success. By decoupling the data and control planes,
SDN abstracts the underlying network hardware from
both the control plane and upper-layer services.
NFV takes direct aim at appliance sprawl. In too many
networks the number of appliances rivals the number of
switches and routers. Appliance capex is therefore large,
but not even as large as the opex of the separate administrative staff each appliance family often requires.
By allowing operators to run network services on
off-the-shelf hardware, NFV reduces the need for
expensive, single-purpose devices, cutting capex significantly — especially if multiple network services
are consolidated onto one piece of hardware.
NFV also lets operators locate functions wherever
they’re needed, be that in the data centre, in network
nodes or on the end-user premises. And NFV simplifies management. Rather than managing individual
appliances, network operators — via NFV — can
consolidate and automate the management of network functions using orchestration or policy software. This cuts management overhead and ensures
consistent service operation across the network.
Many network functions can potentially be virtualised — including firewalls; load balancing; network
address translation; IP multimedia services or IMS;
SSL offload; authentication/authorisation/accounting
services; policy and charging rules functions; WAN
optimisation; various aspects of content delivery
networks; virtual evolved packet core services for
wireless and mobile networks; and broadband remote
access server functionality.
Software processes
These network functions can now be implemented
in software processes that operators can control centrally and provision automatically with orchestration
tools such as NFV’s management and orchestration,
or MANO, as well as OpenStack and CloudStack.
In effect, these SDN-based processes constitute the
network’s brains, which can communicate to the
body — switches, routers, gateways and so on — in an
automatic, open and programmable way.
64 Global Telecoms Business CEO and CFO Guide to OSS/BSS: May/June 2014
What SDN brings to bear
NFV does not eliminate the need to control the
network from inside — many network services need
the cooperation of the data plane, including firewalls
and other security functions that require deep packet
inspection at wire speed.
Even if service chaining is done among virtual
machines running in the same server with switching
done in the hypervisor, the various network elements
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Open Networking Foundation
packets on their way. Consequently, servers can be
placed anywhere and load balancing applied throughout the network as part of automatic traffic engineering, eliminating the bottlenecks of appliance-based
load balancers. Other network functions could be
implemented in a similar way.
Gaining service agility
The combination of NFV and SDN can
help operators use every bit of spare
network capacity to generate new
revenue. Having a separate control
plane makes end-to-end visibility and
management of the network possible
Dan Pitt is executive director of the
Open Networking Foundation
www.opennetworking.org/
must still move packets from the first entry point
into the network to the first series of services that are
chained together.
With a combined NFV-SDN architecture, there’s
no need for a network service to have a single ingress
or egress point to the network, as, for example, load
balancing has required to date. Rather, the first
packet goes to the controller, which can apply a variety of traffic engineering and other processes before
sending the packet — and its successors in the same
flow — towards its destination.
Once load balancing is virtualised, SDN can make
it part of the path selection algorithm. That is, load
balancing can be an augmentation to route computation, which itself is a control-plane software process,
which could be running on a controller or elsewhere.
Since the control plane monitors the network links
and knows which paths are least congested, it uses this
information to direct a query or data to the least congested server. OpenFlow or other SDN-supported
mechanisms populate the forwarding tables of the
switches en route.
With load balancing a part of the path selection
algorithm, the routing engine alone — which may or
may not be coupled with the controller — can send
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From the example above it’s easy to see how NFV and
SDN can simplify service chaining — the SDN controller steers flows to their designated service functions on demand. Operators can simply use orchestration or policy tools to instantiate services across
the network, which greatly simplifies new service
creation; in many cases, services can be provisioned
automatically by the orchestration tool.
Likewise, the combination of NFV and SDN can
help operators use every bit of spare network capacity to generate new revenue. For example, having a
separate control plane makes end-to-end visibility and
management of the network possible. An orchestration
system can use this insight and control to identify excess
capacity and dynamically spin-up billable services.
For example, a customer can be given the opportunity
to stream a video to a home device for later viewing.
With multi-tenant services, operators can pass cost savings on to customers or entice them to take advantage
of time-of-day specials even for routine services.
Alternatively, operators can reduce energy costs by
constructing active paths that exploit excess capacity and by turning off network elements in standby
paths. By enabling operators to reuse and monetise
network capacity during non-peak times, the combination of NFV and SDN helps offset investments in
bandwidth and energy.
For NFV and SDN to become reality, industrywide standards and protocols need to be agreed and
the appropriate software need to be developed. ONF
is committed to developing the SDN-based mechanisms and protocols to support NFV requirements
and use cases.
How operators can help
NFV and SDN have tremendous potential to reduce
operator capex and opex and to boost agility so that
service providers can better compete. ETSI and ONF
are committed to delivering the combined benefits of
these technologies.
Operators can help accelerate this process by making their requirements clear and working with organisations including ETSI and ONF to drive the virtualisation of network functions based on the most
pressing use cases.
Carriers also need to begin thinking like programmers. Rather than looking at the network as a collection of boxes that must be micro-managed, it’s crucial
for operators to start thinking of it as a collection of
software-controlled functions characterised by interfaces, modules, and abstractions that dynamically
bend to the will of the operator and its customers.
To transition successfully to a virtualised environment, operators must also embrace new business
processes. The good news is that these processes will
increasingly be customer-focused and more directly
related to an operator’s bottom line. Q
Global Telecoms Business CEO and CFO Guide to OSS/BSS: May/June 2014 65