GENBAND has announced that Red Hat has certified its NFV software on the Red Hat OpenStack platform. The news came as GENBAND’s annual user conference Perspectives17 got under way in Los Angeles. Red Hat has also certified GENBAND’s Virtual Network Functions (VNF) Manager and several VNFs.
According to Sanjay Bhatia, Vice President of Solutions Marketing and Strategy, GENBAND: “Red Hat is a leader in the delivery of OpenStack for NFV environments, so we are delighted to be a part of their ecosystem and confident that our VNF solutions will be an integral part of our success moving forward. We are already actively engaged in strategic projects at multiple large service providers and are looking forward to helping bring about increased network agility through certified solutions.”
What has Red Hat certified?
As everything becomes ‘software defined’, Network Functions Virtualisation is about moving network services onto a common software platform. For the telco, it is about saving a significant sum of money by being able to use commodity hardware. This means that they no longer have to spend money on bespoke hardware which is expensive.
Red Hat has chosen to certify the complete GENBAND NFV stack on its OpenStack platform. This is a big win for GENBAND. Major telco’s such as Verizon are deploying thousands of small OpenStack clouds. Each of these clouds has their own set of services including NFV.
The full list of Virtual Network Functions that Red Hat has certified includes:
- Advanced Control Software (ACS) VNF for Session Border Controller (SBC) applications
- C3 Call Session Controller VNF
- Advanced Media Software (AMS) VNF for distributed Access and Interconnect SBCs, and Media Interworking & Transcoding applications including IMS Media Resource Function and IMS Media Gateway
- Converged Intelligent Messaging (CIM) VNF for Voice Mail & Messaging applications.
What does this mean?
GENBAND is the latest company to deliver an NFV stack on top of OpenStack. There are two groups of people that this will appeal to. The first is the traditional telco market, especially the smaller telcos. They are looking for anything that will help reduce their CAPEX and maintenance bills. NFV not only does this but as part of a cloud solution such as OpenStack it provides them with something they can quickly monetise.
It will also appeal to enterprise customers. Many are still struggling to complete their unified communications stack. NFV as a cloud solution can be deployed across their own cloud and they can take advantage of it as a cloud service from their service provider.
There is also a benefit to GENBAND. It helps them increase their presence in the cloud market. More importantly, it provides them with another upsell for telcos and cloud providers. It already has a large customer base for its Kandy Cloud Communications products. With NFV on Red Hat OpenStack it now has another route to upsell its products into carriers and the enterprise.
