Paris, Monday, February 22, 2016

The demo – the first of its kind using multi-vendor solutions from Cisco and Nokia – mimics real-life network situations and shows how NFV and SDN capabilities can be delivered in on-demand network.

With the need for faster, smarter and more flexible network systems, Orange is unveiling a new proof of concept of an advanced mobile network that shows how on-demand network functions can be designed and deployed in a virtualised environment, leveraging solutions from differing vendors. Designed in collaboration with Cisco and Nokia and shown on the Orange stand at Mobile World Congress 2016 (Hall 5, Stand 5A61) in Barcelona, Orange is able to demonstrate how it can deliver advanced NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) and SDN (Software Defined Networking) capabilities with promising gains in service deployment times, and simplify network infrastructure while streamlining operations.

This would be particularly useful, for example, for enterprise customers in areas such as managing secure internet access for mobile workers. Managing their own dedicated VPN (Virtual Private Network) with a private gateway access has traditionally been time consuming and challenging for all but the largest of enterprises; today’s proof of concept demonstrates how cloud and virtualisation can create new solutions for enterprises without lengthy set-up times and large management costs, because of the flexibility that NFV and SDN can deliver.

“In order to accelerate our roadmap towards a cloud-based, all IP network, we need more multi-vendor solutions that are interoperable. This proof of concept, thanks to Cisco and Nokia working efficiently together with Orange, shows that we can utilise advanced NFV and SDN capabilities to speed up service deployment times and to offer potential cost optimisation while increasing flexibility. In our view, interoperability is a key success factor so we hope that this proof-of-concept will spur the industry to work towards more interoperability,” commented Alain Maloberti, Senior Vice President, Orange Labs Networks.

On the network side, NFV and SDN capabilities are leveraged to dynamically deploy a dedicated virtual EPC (evolved packet core) with high availability and on-demand scalability. More specifically, the proof-of-concept confirms a number of benefits:

• Virtualised infrastructures that integrate components from multiple vendors are practical. In this case, this project combined Cisco’s new Ultra Service Platform (providing a virtual EPC, its VNF manager and Cisco NSO service provisioning functions), and Nokia CloudBand NFV-Infrastructure with Nuage Networks Virtualized Service Platform and Nokia CloudBand Network Director embedded.
• Virtualised solutions can simplify operations through automation and orchestration. The benefits of simplified operations which emerged in this network included:

o Faster and on-demand deployment of end to end services in distributed Next Generation Points of Presence environment o High-Availability and geo-redundancy solutions enabling end to end service continuity o On-demand scalability achieved by adding resources to address customer capacity demand in a dynamic way (”Elasticity”)