Hewlett Packard Enterprise to participate in OPNFV Pharos community test labs project

HPE OpenNFV partners will be able to test their solutions on OPNFV architecture to accelerate NFV adoption

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 22, 2016 – Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) announced that it will participate in the Linux Foundation’s OPNFV Pharos Project through the HPE OpenNFV Labs. HPE’s participation in OPNFV Pharos will help advance the evolution of network functions virtualization (NFV) and ensure consistency and interoperability for the HPE OpenNFV partner ecosystem. The announcement is being made during this week’s OPNFV Summit.

In addition, HPE will institute processes to verify that its more than 75 HPE OpenNFV partners have OPNFV compliant solutions. This will allow HPE OpenNFV partners to confirm they can run on the OPNFV platform and ensure OPNFV compatibility across environments and vendors, reinforcing HPE’s open, multi-vendor approach to NFV. Communications service providers (CSPs) will then then be able to connect with OPNFV-certified virtual network functions (VNF) partners through the HPE OpenNFV Solution Portal.

“Our involvement in OPNFV Pharos Labs and our plan to integrate HPE and OPNFV’s onboarding processes are evidence of HPE’s commitment to open source and demonstrate how HPE OpenNFV and OPNFV are complementary efforts to accelerate NFV deployments,” said Prodip Sen, CTO, NFV, HPE and board chair, OPNFV. “Now that we are part of a broader NFV testing environment, we will be able to exchange our experience and learnings with the industry and will be able to improve NFV implementation and interoperability in a consistent way.”

The Pharos project is a federated NFV testing infrastructure of community labs around the world designed for hosting continuous integration, deployment and testing of the OPNFV platform. The diversity of perspectives across developers, users and vendors participating in these labs make the project critical to the success of the OPNFV platform.

“With a broad industry involved in the development of NFV, we’re seeing increased collaboration across the ecosystem. We welcome HPE’s OpenNFV lab and the focus on interoperability which will benefit the greater ecosystem,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Accelerating NFV deployments is our number one mission and having HPE onboard complements that vision.”

HPE is a platinum-level founding member of OPNFV and contributes to a range of related open-source initiatives.

“The promise of NFV has always been based on an ability to integrate and onboard solutions from a diverse vendor community,” notes Peter Jarich, vice president of Consumer and Infrastructure research at Current Analysis. “As much as OPNFV was formed to help turn this promise into a reality, HPE’s commitment to Pharos and OPNFV’s onboarding processing is a great step forward for HPE’s customers and the broader industry.”

About the HPE OpenNFV Program

The HPE approach to NFV is built around adherence to openness and standards, a key benefit of which is the ability to enable other telco ecosystem vendors, including network equipment providers, independent software vendors and systems integrators, to introduce new innovations on top of the HPE OpenNFV platform. This allows CSPs to choose different components from the vendors that best meet their needs, accelerating NFV deployments and providing customers a simplified end-to-end experience from ordering, to deployment, operations, lifecycle management and services.

For additional information on HPE OpenNFV visit www.hpe.com/us/en/networking/nfv.html