• Service Director solution available in Q1 this year
• Enables closed-loop automation of assurance and fulfilment
• Dynamic service descriptors for open service modelling

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled its new Service Director NFV product, which it describes as a new end-to-end service operations solution designed to help communications service providers (CSPs) manage services across hybrid networks. As TelecomTV discovered recently, successfully managing a hybrid legacy OSS and NFV network is going to be crucial to facilitate the eventual evolution to all-NFV and SDN (see our coverage of GEN15 and OPNFV for plenty of examples).

HPE says its new solution enables automation, providing a simplified approach to managing services in network functions virtualization deployments by bridging existing physical and new virtualized environments. The product expands upon HPE NFV Director’s management and orchestration (MANO) capabilities.

“There is no such thing as a greenfield NFV implementation,” said David Sliter, VP and GM, Communications & Media Solutions, HPE. “Service Director is a transformational change in the relationship between assurance and fulfilment, allowing the OSS resource pool to be treated, automated and managed as a service. Our approach provides a more dynamic service model, enabling CSPs to bridge existing physical and new environments and dramatically improve their service agility.”

He adds that current OSS setups and the coexistence of physical and virtual infrastructure can introduce obstacles that hinder service agility, slowing time-to-market. Such inhibitors require a new approach to end-to-end service operations.

As well as enabling closed-loop automation of assurance and fulfilment for unified operations, Service Director also utilises common data to help ensure quality and accuracy and “single pane of glass” management to improve productivity. Dynamic service descriptors will provide open, flexible modelling of services, their relationships and their behaviour, to drive operational agility.

HPE Service Director is an extension to the company’s existing OpenNFV portfolio, providing unified operation of existing NFV orchestrators and traditional OSS assets. Version 1.0 will be available worldwide in early 2016, with pre-configured solutions addressing specific use cases delivered as extensions to the base product.